Most of this chatlog is "you" adding more noise than is necessary for this transaction.
For example: "Please tell us the reason for your call today?" Should be met with the answer, "Please cancel my subscription." "May I ask why you want to cancel?" "Please cancel my subscription." "Have you ever used reader mode?" "Please cancel my subscription."
Those writing the script are taking advantage of your aversion to skip social graces when they decide what questions the low-ranking representative will ask you.
The only winning move is not to play. It's not the individual's fault, but neither is it fair on you to play along. Be polite, but direct, and don't play the game.
The script they have doesn't work anymore. If it's designed to make you stay it has backfired in spectacular way.
Even with the system is a simple drop-down I always choose “other” and enter n/a in the comment box.
This reads as someone determined to get something juicy they could screenshot, or else someone who was already so annoyed from having to find the cancellation method on the site that they let it cloud their responses to what was a relatively painless process.
Period.
I give you money. You give me a service. I stop giving you money. You stop giving me the service.
Its just that goddamn simple.
Very few people actually determined to cancel are going to be convinced by something like this, I suspect. There's a whole cottage industry of mostly older, upper-middle class folks who call customer service lines once a year to get their rebate. I find the whole game rather reprehensible (on the part of the companies that allow it). It constitutes a kind of wealth transfer to the people who have the free time, energy, and ability to play the game. I'd much rather these companies just reduce the price across the board towards the "average" payment, and stick to their guns with the people who call in.
This would eliminate so many hours of pointless work and frustration.
It's price discrimination.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price_discrimination
Usually, it's not worth the time to haggle over people to figure out the most they are willing to pay for low margin retail goods, so you don't see it at Walmart or the grocery store. But for high margin goods, such as cars, real estate, B2B sales etc, each buyer has a different amount they are willing to pay, and so you want to try and capture as much of everyone's capacity to pay as possible.
Actually, come to think of it, low margin retail and grocery does it too with coupons and whatnot that some people are willing to spend time on and others are not.
Yes! I was going to mention that this is really a pretty universal feature of "pricing", but decided that was too controversial an angle on what was a rather simple point.
A single chat interaction? Not horrible.
That’s not your problem if you want to cancel.
OP chose the chat route, was complaining to the virtual chat bot for a whole page in the screenshot, then presented technical issues as a reason for cancelation - which the human support rep correctly tried to help the customer with, and customer engaged in that discussion, and once OP said they want the subscription canceled regardless (just a few messages later) it got canceled.
If you were to run a business, and a customer tells you the only reason they no longer wish to remain your customer is because of technical issues that you know how to solve, would you just try to help them, or would you ignore it?
Let's say someone disabled javascript in their browser, and your website doesn't work because of it, would you just cancel their subscription or would you offer to help and if they still insist on canceling it then cancel it like the rep in the screenshot did?
I'm subscribed to NYT and WP to help support journalism; I'm using Samsung's Internet browser which is just great - no ads, easy on the battery, and a dark mode to boot.