Offboarding: Saying Goodbye with Grace | Hacker News Reader

Offboarding: Saying Goodbye with Grace

uxdesign.cc

71 pointsar280829 comments

I wish more companies did things like this. I had a really horrible experience trying to cancel my ADT security subscription and they simply wouldn’t take no for an answer after being on the phone for an hour. It ended badly with me throwing a tantrum and shouting and banging. I will never use that company again nor recommend their services because of their obtuse off boarding process. Had they handled their offboarding better I might still be a potential customer in the future.

I think it’s similar with quitting your job and “not burning bridges”. You never know what may happen in the future.

Nothing guarantees never returning to a company like making leaving hard or impossible. Because you know if you sign up again the leaving process will be painful. It instantly goes on the bad company list.

I've come to the conclusion that the older the company, the shadier the cancellation process usually is. Last week I had to spend an entire hour in a chat window to cancel my Economist subscription, talking to a sales rep who, after ~10 Are you sure? questions, 'pulled all strings' looking what he can do for me to find the right button in his SAP backend — you know, that one cancellation button that should usually be right there on my account page...

Not sure who, but I almost thought of subscribing to a paper.

Then I recalled the horror stories for papers, so looked for how to unsubscribe, and these clowns actually required a phone call to cancel. WTF?!

So ended all thoughts of subscribing. Idiots.

I've mentioned this several times, but people must think it ruins your credit rating or something. Whatever. Their loss.

Go to privacy.com, and you can set up a temporary credit card with preset limits on spending. You want to cancel some service, just close the card. Now you're in control. The sticky company will figure out for itself that you're done with them, believe me.

They also notify you whenever someone uses the card, so you can't forget about your subscriptions.

They will say "yes" to whatever name & address they're given, so you don't even need to provide your real name & address when you subscribe. Obviously you could have a fake email address, too.

Privacy? That costs $10/month. I don't have it, and the real transactions do appear on my bank statement. But it's free. If you buy the privacy option, then they make up fake names for the vendors.

Just about any challenger bank like Revolut will give you free virtual cards to spin up/down, incl. limit definitions.

I think even some big old banks do things like this.

Good to know. Will they verify your (fake) name & address, too?

Anyhow, it's time to fight back against these roach motel subscription companies. Just shut off the money.

I think all of these alternative number cards use your name and address as the billing address, it just prevents unauthorized charges.

There is the chance this can backfire. Cancelling the card doesn't void the contract you made with the company. If they care to they can come after you for the continued subscription cost since you never cancelled and are therefore technically still on the hook.

I’ve given the middle finger to scum companies like this before after failing to cancel the “normal” way, no problems so far. They’re welcome to sue me, though they’d have to explain why my attempts at cancelling “per the rules” were ignored and they can’t do that.

There may be "the chance" but it hasn't happened yet.

And as I said, you can also give a fake name, address, and email if you're really worried.

It's kind of like a tax on the entire industry. I've had so many experiences with subscriptions being excessively tough to cancel that I'm very reluctant to start a subscription to anything. Unfortunately, it isn't in many people's interest to make it smoother.

I am the same. If I am not sure even about something free just asking me for an email address I may very well just walk away because I have no idea the amount of abuse they might put me through and how hard it will be to cancel it. The bad actors in the industry are ruining everyone's confidence in potentially new interests and products.

It might have been manageable if the entire review industry had not put itself on sale and is largely just affiliate farming to make money. I would pay for a good review site but I got burnt by Which lying about having reviewed a product and then making cancellation hard. Honestly the way most companies behave is shockingly bad so I tend not to sign up to much new now, until the GDPR breaching companies and all these dark pattern sites are cleaned up by regulation there isn't a way to safely do it and not have an email account end up getting spammed.

I just did that this morning.

I probably should have been an easy conversion. I went directly looking for a certain kind of thing. I was in a state of feeling frustrated about not having that thing. I found a company that seemed initially promising. But, as soon as I found out that I would have to give them my email address in order to find our more about their service, I just closed the browser tab without a second thought.

I didn't have a conscious reason for doing so at the time, but, in retrospect, it's probably because I strongly associate that kind of aggressive conversion funnel with a poor - oftentimes even emotionally abusive - offboarding experience.

It became a bit of a pattern recommendation on Hacker news to do this and I think its ultimately wrong. Make it easy to minimally sign up but it has to come along with some reassurances too and if there isn't enough information up front about what the thing is and what will happen to that email address it turns into an anti pattern and a big warning sign.

I agree that there's a really annoying trend where seemingly every website constantly spams popups to try and get your email address. Or browser notifications now. No, there's zero chance I want your news site or blog to constantly spam my email or notifications with updates. If you can't be bothered to put a website up saying what your site or service is about, I definitely don't want to get email about it.

I can't even believe 99% of these sites get any real sales / draw from their spam regardless.

I'm convinced it is all "monkey see, monkey do", they read some reddit post, and it mentioned marketing 101 aka email emails!!, and so they need to spam.

I feel the same too and this could easily be solved by using a junk email address for that. I still don’t bother though, the amount of deception has permanently switched my behaviour to simply ignore any such service that asks for email address before I even know what it does.

I recently had to cancel Which? as well and was disappointed and surprised considering the organisation’s mission. My original idea was to re-subscribe when I need the service again but that’s now off the table.

I hate to put in a good word for Paypal but being able to cancel paid subscriptions on your own is a godsend when signing up for services that take it as payment processor.

When you want to cancel something and it looks like they might start giving you grief, write to them via physical mail on signed-for delivery. Specify in the letter they are to respond to you by writing only.

If at all appropriate label it as a complaint or send it via the complaint department and do some quick research in advance on how to escalate the complaint outside the company. Then find a way to let them know that you know how to do this in the letter, for example by writing something like "the ombudsman states you have x weeks to respond to me before I can escalate this situation with them".

Companies cannot dictate to you that you cannot write to them. They try very hard to stop you, but it does not hold up. When you do write to them it shows you won't be fooled by their crap and they will stop messing you around. If you can't find a contract address on their website, google their head office.

I actually can't stand the "we'll save your preferences and deactivate everything for you!" pattern as well. No, I want my account deleted, gone. Forget you ever saw me, please.

Many years ago, I had to unsubscribe from the Wall St. Journal, because I had returned from the US to my home country India. It was one of the most difficult things I've had to do. It cost me nearly a $100 in International telephone calls to unsubscribe. I simply will never subscribe to a newspaper ever again.

Seriously, how do I close my Amazon account?

Send a death certificate.

There's no automated way to do it. You have to send a message to customer service asking to have your account closed.

You may need to be persistent. It's been a while, so maybe this has improved, but they hassled me a lot in the process when I did it.

I did this last week, it was pretty easy to find in account settings. They allowed me to delete my whole account, and required an email confirmation. On the other hand, I hadn't used it for much, and I live in Canada, so I can't speak to what others will see.

Amazon prime you mean? Came her to complain about that. In the prime app, there is a button that disconnects your device from the account, but it just logs you out. You need to go to the website to manage your subscription, and after a few screens and then there is a button you need to keep pressed down for several seconds before it works. Keep reading the button labels because the default button will keep you subscribed. Whoever built/ordered that knew it was immoral.

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