This is an anti-pattern that some companies follow. I remember trying to cancel an account from a grocery delivery service. There was no option online to cancel the subscription. The only option was to call them during their working hours which were different from mine because we were in different time zones. After waiting for 30mins I finally got connected to a human on the other side. They tried pressure sales tactics to get me to continue with the service even though I made it clear that I did not need their service anymore. The call itself took about 30 minutes. This is such an egregious waste of my time just to cancel a frickin subscription. These services cost actual money. On the other hand, there are "free" newsletters which hide their unsubscription button under layers of pages and clicks. It's a good thing gmail provides an "unsubscribe" button on the top. There should be a service which basically manages all your subscriptions(bits/bytes & atoms/molecules) in one place and allows you to activate/deactivate them. I would definitely pay for such a service. Or a website which ranks services based on ease of use, cost, cancelling headaches, most important clauses in their terms of use etc.
> After waiting for 30mins I finally got connected to a human on the other side. They tried pressure sales tactics to get me to continue with the service even though I made it clear that I did not need their service anymore. The call itself took about 30 minutes. This is such an egregious waste of my time just to cancel a frickin subscription.
This brings back memories of one of my first jobs. I worked for a call center outsourcing company doing overnight tech support for a nationwide ISP that would advise you when you received mail. One of the things we did was to dump all calls into the same call queue after 2am in my time zone so the first four hours of my shift were normal technical support calls and the last six hours were everything, including billing.
The contract owners in Virginia were very motivated that we continue the heavy-handed "retention" efforts even in the generalist phone queue. I remember one script we were given for cancellations ran to fifteen pages, including notes and policies.
But one of the myriad nice things about working in the middle of the night is there are no managers around to give a shit and the on-shift Quality Assurance rep was an employee of my call center company, not of the big ISP like on other shifts, and the overnight QA people officially gave zero shits. If anyone wound up in the all-purpose queue asking to cancel, we'd all do it with minimal hassle because we hated the process as much as the soon-to-be-ex-customers.
(When Virginia rolled out new policies to "verify" script compliance, like flagging cancellations made on calls with a handle time under ten minutes--which is saying something in itself--we'd just put the customer on hold for 12 minutes to "process the cancellation" and go on a free break.)
> There should be a service which basically manages all your subscriptions(bits/bytes & atoms/molecules) in one place and allows you to activate/deactivate them.
