Ask HN: How does your app deal with the death of one of your users? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: How does your app deal with the death of one of your users?

141 pointsherodotus36 comments

My wife died recently. I had to close various accounts. From an IT perspective, the results were shameful. For example, I called her cell-phone provider and closed her account. The agent was very respectful. He offered condolences and closed the account, and said there would be a refund. The next day, there was an email, addressed to my wife, using her first name, asking her to rate her recent experience.

I had to use text messaging to close her NY Times subscription. I texted "I need to cancel a subscription" The bot asked me why

1. No time to read

2. Price concern

3. Service issue

And I was told I had to answer 1, 2, or 3! Really?

Then a human got involved, and he/she was good, but obviously the bot still has some control because at the end I got this:

"Thank for contacting the New York Times, I hope you have a wonderful rest of the day."

Come on.....this is terrible. The human realized this and immediately added

"And also before you go, I wanted to express my most sincere condolonces to you and your family"

There is more, but this may be enough. My question for those of you working on apps that have registered users or subscribers: how do you deal with notification that one of your clients has died? Did you even give this use case some thought?

Pro Tip: keep the deceased's phone active as long as possible so that, even if you have all their passwords, you might still need it for 2FA.

My father was murdered last year, and his iPhone X will be kept forever in evidence.

It has made dealing w/ all of his affairs very challenging as Verizon gave away his number as soon as we informed them about the situation.

If the number was given to someone else, that's actually a pretty good outcome. Just call the new number owner and ask them to forward you a few sms tokens.

Hmm, isn't that how scamers operate?

Not exactly on topic but might be interesting: I recently did some consulting work for a government agency in a small country with a national ID/certificate scheme that is used both in GOV, NGO and COM. One of my suggestions was for a webhook like scheme to notify sites/services that a person has been moved from the national registry to the registry of deceased, specifically to trigger automatic cancellations and the like. Their ID scheme also handles power of attorney so the service could be notified about that also.

I suggest you watch the movie “Brazil”.

I am very sorry to hear about the loss of your dear wife. this is something that I am going to have to go through soon as well since my wife is terminally ill. Thankfully it will be easier considering the she has already made provisions for most things. But at the same time I have been thinking about this and I realize that most places still don't have a good process for it. I'll just pretend I'm her and close them as needed. for everything else I'll just suffer through it I suppose. I'm not a developer in so I can't comment on the rest. I work in web hosting and in our industry a death certificate is typically required before an account could be handed over to someone else. In those cases as well it's better to just pretend that you're the deceased and transfer the account as needed. I wish you all the best! I'm sure this will be just one small part of a very difficult process.

I went through this for a relative recently. It blew my mind that many very large companies seemed surprised and unprepared when I called them to say my relative was deceased and to close accounts, like this never happens and they didn’t know what to do.

truly mind blowing. I guess most people wouldn't bother closing accounts for free services, but I have to imagine anything involving a recurring fee would be routinely closed as part of handling the estate. how do they not have a process for handling a relatively frequent event?

Wikipedia is governed by it’s users, so this might not apply to other businesses. However, I thought it would be worth mentioning that the community has written guidelines for memorializing deceased Wikipedians and dealing with their accounts.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Deceased_Wikipedians

> And I was told I had to answer 1, 2, or 3! Really?

That just isn't very good. Of course, death is another reason, but there may also be many other reasons they did not consider; they will need to add at least two more options, one for "other reason not listed" and one for "refuse to answer".

I see this a lot more now. I think it’s a misguided strategy around trying to reduce the number of people choosing ‘other’ if it’s available because data from is seen as not useful. They don’t seem to realize that by limiting options in this way they will only pollute the results altogether with people just picking anything to get to the next step.

Well strictly speaking, #1 is the correct answer.

It will unfortunately be the final answer for all of us.

I'm very sorry for your loss. The audience for my gardening reminders email subscription includes a lot of older people. I have received a number of requests to end subscriptions on the death of a spouse. I handle as I hope they wish - immediately and with a brief note of acknowledgement.

My condolences for your loss.

For the two specific cases you experienced, it seems like the auto-miscommunication could’ve been prevented if the customer service person had an option to disable auto-follow-up messages. Which is a feature you think they’d have for a much more common situation: angry customers.

We're theoretically not able to prevent follow-ups for this exact reason. If I've just failed a customer, I just tick the box to say no follow up? Angry customers are why the feedback loop exists.

(We're technically able. We can change their contact details before the case is closed. It's a dirty little secret.)

But this is the problem. The feedback loop is usually intended to evaluate the rep. The rep should not be in charge of this. This would be an edge-case within an edge-case. If I had to suggest a solution, I'd suggest the only way to break this loop is for the rep to forward the 'case', recording and all, to their manager. But then we have to trust the manager doesn't want to fluff results either.

Isn’t this what audit logs are for? You make disabling a follow up require a written statement & sign off from direct manager. Automated systems detect abnormalities for middle management to look in to.

Sorry for your loss. I know it's hard, and the cold computer-automated world of today will mindlessly still remind you of your loved one in a million different ways. You just gotta be patient, take a break, or perhaps delegate some of those tasks to friends or family.

Many companies don't know how or haven't thought about how to deal with the death of a user or subscriber. As an estate admin, I've had trouble dealing even with established banking institutions who may or may not train all their employees on what to do or who to contact when a customer has passed away.

One thing, I discovered was Hereditas (https://withblue.ink/2019/03/18/what-happens-to-your-digital...), a project that's sort of like a "deadman's switch" which may help the survivors deal with all the digital loose-ends that one's death might leave behind. This, combined with proper estate planning might hopefully make things easier for those we leave behind.

This is an interesting question that came to my attention when my service https://2fb.me was used to send notifications on Twitter about the death of their loved one. I was heartbroken when my app failed to share the tweets to Facebook in the early test phases. I turned from treating my users as free qa testers into realizing they installed my application for a very important purpose (broadcasting important messages to the largest audience possible). They assumed because it was public it would work for their needs. Instead of solving the problem it added to her grief and this really upset me. My support system was lagging behind because I was still developing the app and furthermore her support messages where therefore ignored for some time. This was a watershed moment for me as a product developer.

Sorry for your loss. Those interactions and outrageous and nearly comical.

I will try take this into account for my future projects or my teams projects.

I'm so sorry for your loss.

I don't think we have a system in place at my work, and I don't remember a system for any previous jobs either.

My condolences. It must be difficult to deal with these day to day things in such a trying time.

I had been planning to cancel my own Netflix subscription for a while, when my father passed away. For some reason I felt compelled to do it on that day. I don't understand what drove me to, but I vividly remember how petty it felt along with all other practical responsibilities while I was grieving.

I recommend that you take your time and mourn before worrying about these matters. It may have been a form of keeping occupied in my case.

Shouldn't you just cancel his cards and solve all the problems at once? What's the point of calling Netflix?

IANAL, but unfortunately I believe this results in outstanding charges against the estate. closing a payment account is usually not considered a valid way of terminating a subscription. I would hope the "creditors" would have the decency not to go after the estate in this situation, but you can never be too careful.

I would imagine Netflix just cancels your subscription if the charge fails. It's not like if the charge fails you still get to watch stuff and then Netflix calls you on the phone later asking for money, right?

AFAIK that's correct in the Netflix, and Spotify, cases.

Some services charge you in advance for the next period, so if you fail to pay they will (or should) simply stop the service.

NYTimes is the worst. I legit hate their system. Signing up is so easy. Input credit card payment details and click a button. Done!

Cancelling is another beast. It took me 2 months to cancel. So many phone calls that never end up to the person in charge of cancellation. They make cancellation really hard. Eventually I reported to my bank, who cancelled my credit card. Really hate NY times.

DO NOT SUBSCRIBE TO NY TIMES.

No need to cancel the card - you can simply block all payments to them, and they'll quickly end your subscrt.

That really puts a different spin on this dark pattern... There are situations in which a person must cancel their contract and these companies are trying to abuse that situation to make money.

This is where a simple auto cancel fails and a cancel by opening a support ticket is far superior.

I'm really sorry for your loss.

I am so sorry for your loss.

This is terrible. Sorry for your loss.

With a wave of deaths coming from COVID.. this is going to be a big issue in the coming days/weeks.

Aren't less people dying overall though? People aren't out driving as much or taking other risks.

That would make sense. I would love to read some stats on this if you have them.

In some regions, so far, I believe so. We can also expect fewer deaths from the flu, which is not insignificant. We'll see whether this remains true.

My condolences

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