> Users can be forced to navigate as many as 23 screens and take as many as 32 actions to cancel.
> Users can be forced to navigate as many as 23 screens and take as many as 32 actions to cancel.
It's things like this that make agents potentially exciting. So much of enshittification is wrapping an essentially good service in a crappy and misleading UI to drive extra revenue. If you can replace the lying UI with a more honest one, and then do a fair and automatic comparison between Uber and Lyft, a lot of the annoyance goes away.
The Uber Eats delivery time estimates are a lie, plain and simple. Once they have your money in hand, they'll shamelessly admit to the lie, which is why the estimate jumps instantaneously.
First, there are three different ways that orders can come in. 1) Tight integration into the POS system. 2) Through a separate parallel physical tablet. 3) Something spits out something on a printer.
There are opportunities with 1 and 2 to do some sort of feedback on how busy things are. I know for the tablet option that at least for some restaurants they are able to indicate how long the order will take.
But half the places I get to have no integration, they just put the ticket on the pile and it's done when it's done. A couple places that do this in particular also don't even start the order until the driver shows up, on purpose. The app will tell the customer I'll pick it up in 5 minutes no matter what. There's a chain that does prep work in front of the customer, but certain locations will not make pickup/delivery orders if there's anyone in line in the shop. I stopped doing deliveries there.
You'd also think that places with the potential for awesome metrics making pickup timing a breeze would be fast food chains, right? Nope. Not a single iota of smart integration whatsoever.
I've found that keeping customers in the loop as to what's happening with their deliveries ends up keeping them happy, even if it's gonna be slow. I suppose some things never change.
Talking to people really does help though, everyone wants to be more forgiving when you remind them theirs a human factor involved in getting the food to them.
In my mind it should be something like 3 or 4 screens/prompts max.
Account (1) -> Cancel (2) -> Are you sure (3) -> Why did you cancel (4).
1: Account
2: Cancel
3: Call this number.
4: Call number.
5: Welcome to Customer Service press… … …press 9 to cancel.
6: We need to confirm who you are. Give birth date, etc.
7: Are you sure?
8: Agent gets on the line.
9: Why do you want to cancel?
10: We are offering you a discount to continue and not cancel, how about that?
11: Cancel
12: Are you sure again? (This time for real)
13: Cancelled, but we are offering you a BIGGER discou… this is when I hang up.
For Uber? In the handful of times I've canceled uber one trials I've never seen this. It's always through the app. Not even the FTC complaint alleges this.
I ran into this with a NYTimes subscription I tried to cancel. They detected I wasn't in a state with such protections and removed the cancellation options while not providing a way to cancel. Made things real hard to shutdown.
I should (pretend to) cancel more often!
I used to do this with the cable company but they seem to have gotten wise to it. Last time I tried in 2020 they basically told me to pound sand.
Fortunately I got fiber now and got to tell them to pound sand instead.
I felt a little bit bad about hanging up but mostly I was just mad.
Very clearly intended to combat “oh shit I need to cancel that one” when the charge shows up in hopes you forget again.
While I never implemented a restriction like this, it would have prevented a lot of weird bugs/customer support issues and kept the underlying code much simpler.
(Annoying math = time zones, prorations, discounts, billing cycle anchors, etc. see the “falsehoods programmers believe about X” series)
(Systems to sync between = internal DBs, billing APIs, payment processors, etc.)
[0] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/mar/03/uber-secr...
The worst I've experienced was equifax. I signed up for a free trial to see where my credit sat and what was up, then cancelled. It was a phone call, 30 minute wait, and SUPER weaselly behavior in the call center script. Something to the effect of Them: "Hey we want to give you this free gift", Me: "Will that gift keep my subscription active?" Them: "yes". Repeated several times as they tried just a bunch of avenues to not cancel my account. I literally had to say "No, I just want you to cancel my account" or "Are you going to cancel my account" like 20 times. It took over an hour.
I walked out before I became another victim.
This works for me, and I have no qualms lying to circumvent stupid tactics like these. I have turned into a LIAR when speaking to customer service for stuff like this because it just makes me more sympathetic as a customer, even though it's insane and unfair that one has to do this as a sort of social hack instead of the business just doing the right thing.