How The Game Is Played

The meaning of "service"

We at Sun believe in Online services. We believe its the wave of the future. But for a service to be a service it must serve the individual.

I sign up for a lot of services to try them out. Or I have up til now. Recently there seems to be a disturbing trend in online services to make it harder then it has to be to cancel. As servcie is all about rentention, and I'm sure making it hard to cancel ups their rentention percentage a measurable amount, the bean counters would tell me this is good for their service and by extension the industry itself.

Hogwash. You may keep some extra few percentage points in your retention numbers this way folks, but you will ultimately kill the golden goose as once someone feels taken advantage of once by your "support" structure they will be ten times as wary before every signing up for another of your services.

People aren't *that* stupid. They can certainly figure out that, if you computer can register them with a mouse click, it could de-register them just as easily. Instead though I am finding to cancel I have to call up and talk to support people. There is no reason for that except to make it harder to cancel.

At least Warner Brothers seems to have learned something from the initial outrage at this that boiled up from their customer base and they are now making it a fast, reasonably painless call and seem to have 24x7 coverage. Real Rhapsody OTOH I am going to have to call back tomrorow during "business hours" to cancel.

Guess which company I'm never trying another service offering from?

Posted at 09:29PM May 23, 2005 by gameguy in General  |  Comments[0]