Monday, April 2, 2012

Take on the Vonage cancellation ordeal

As frustrated as I was with cancelling my BOINGO account a few weeks ago, VONAGE trumped it today.    It's as if these companies are all trying to one-up each-other in making it difficult to cancel the service.   With Vonage I count 10 different attempts to thwart my effort to complete a simple cancellation transaction.

Obviously like any service, you can add any feature you want online but when it comes to cancelling service it involves an actual phone-call.      (attempt #1)

There are what seems like a hundred prompts before you can cancel the service.  (attempt#2)     

Then they spend some time trying to scare you with things like 'if you are not the primary account-holder' than you aren't able to make any changes (attempt #3)

They then give me that they are very busy and I may want to call later and say that I'm looking at a 5 to 15 minute hold time and say that it may be longer  (attempt #4)

They ask why I want to cancel the service and I tell them that I'm not using it and it's a waste of money (attempt #5)  he tell me he'll fill the request and be right back

Another 3 minutes on hold (attempt #6 hoping I just hang up before the transaction is done)

They ask what service I will switch to which I told him that I'd be keeping my cell-phone (attempt #7)

He says he has to process the request and that it should be another few minutes.. Another 3 minutes on hold (attempt #8)

The guy finally comes back and tries to make another attempt to keep me with their service by offering some kind of lame freebie (attempt #9)

I cut him off saying that I'm not interested and that I'm only trying to cancel the service

He then says I have to wait on hold for another 2-3 minutes so they can process the cancellation request (attempt #10)

The entire process on the phone was 12 minutes and 41 seconds which doesn't even count the 3 or 4 minutes I spent navigating their terrible website to figure out that I can't cancel it without calling

 

What ever happened to being OK with "your service is fine, I just don't need it please cancel it" and let me go on with my life.. I didn't hate your company before this, I just didn't need it at this point in my life.. I would have had NO issue signing up again before this phone-call but with this difficulty I am now LESS likely to use them again.

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