Customer Disservice: Oy!
Blog: Saideman's Semi-Spew
I find it hard to believe I have not dedicated a post here to whining about shitty customer service, but I couldn't find such a post. Yea! A chance to write something new!I subscribed to the web version Toronto Star to get access to their coverage of the various Canadian military controversies. But I found that I was not reading much over there anymore. So, I tried to cancel my subscription. Funny how they make it easy to subscribe but very difficult to unsubscribe:there is nothing on the website to change one's account settings. The page for managing one's account is mis-titled since I could not manage my account. No hint of how to unsubscribe.No phone number for managing one's subscriptions on the webpage. The only phone number is the general one.What happens when you call the general number? I kept getting disconnected.I emailed a while back to the electronic support to ask to be cancelled and they gave me a phone number that is only staffed in the mornings. Oh, and it is not an 800 number. Luckily it was staffed today.So, the guy (from far, far away) on the phone first couldn't find my info as I assumed he could spell Steve... my bad. Then he kept wanting to know how he could fix the situation other than unsubscribing. I was losing my temper... so nope, no fix. You make it hard to unsubscribe, that just hardens my need to unsubscribe.Then he wanted to know why I wanted to unsubscribe to fill in the boxes on his form: your paper sucks. Sure, the coverage can be ok, but I have let this bad experience with customer disservice color my view.In between, I tried to get my credit card company to stop the automatic payment, and they refused. They said the only option they had was to cancel the card, which is pretty damned inconvenient. Why can't they just enter into their computers not to accept charges from a specific company? They can enter autopayments so why can't they stop specific autopayments? It should not be this hard. So, that is my rant du jour. That the move to online has made things easier to sign up but not to sign out, that they resist, hoping that you give up, and that credit card companies sure make it hard to change who I am paying.Fuck.