Nubility.Net

PC World is running a good article on who’s naughty and who’s nice in the world of technically-assisted service cancellations. Its interesting to see who the real abusers are, but it doesn’t offer any explicit substantive suggestions on how to get cancelled when you want to. Even if you aren’t going to read the whole article, you should note Flickr’s TOS, where once you upgrade you can’t go back, and the really underhanded way True.Com (good anti-True.Com Site) handles their customers.         Here are a few suggestions you won’t find in the article to make dealing with customer service easier:

• When you fill in one of those forms to cancel your account, copy the text to an email before you send it,

  and send it to yourself. This provides you with a record of your request.

• Copy yourself on any emails to the company.
• When you call the company use your MP3 player to record the phone call. This is easy with MP3 players that have a microphone, and virtually every customer service number you call will notify you that “this call may be monitored for customer service and training purposes”, and you are certianly going to use these phone calls to help improve their customer trianing skills if necessary. Also, creating an MP3 makes it simple to share with your credit card company when you file the dispute, either by email or posting on a web page, it is indisputable proof that they said what you claimed they said, and it makes it easy to get the names and dates of people you need to talk to in case it becomes necessary. I no longer make one of these “customer service” calls without recording it.
• When the company doesn’t live up to its word, protest to the credit card company, with the evidence you’ve garnered above.
• Know the rules for the Terms of Service (this is not always possible, I understand… sigh)
• If you aren’t getting satisfaction on the phone, always ask for a supervisor
• Always ask for a refu nd if you think it is appropriate
• Appeal to the supervisor’s reasonable side. When they claim that “I have no information on that”, I’ve found the claim “but I’m the customer, and I’ve told you that your previous representative said such and such, and you’ve got no reason to disbelieve me, and several reasons to believe me” (without a mention of the previous recorded call).

When all of those are not good enough, I’ve occasionally resorted to changing the number that they are authorized to charge my account to, then immediately canceling the credit card, so that they can’t charge anything else to it. This has always turned the tide in my favor when negotiating with hard-to-deal with companies, because you have your money instead of them.

Got comments on this? I’d love to hear them.