Weasles

I’m sick of online services that make it difficult to cancel.

How it shouldn’t be done

FASTHOSTS: As any reader of PCPro (or this blog) will know, Fasthosts are not my  favourite company. They made such a complete dog’s dinner of handling a security intrusion (basically they left their customers to do much of the work themselves without even the sweetener of a free month’s rental) that I decided to cancel. How do you cancel? Well, there’s no sign of this procedure anywhere on the site that I could find. In the end, I emailed their customer support to be told (24 hours later) that I needed to ring a phone number in order to cancel. Excuse me? Having rung the number I was sent an email form to fill in, so why ring in the first place, why not have a link to the form? We all know why: it’s to put a block in the way of people cancelling. It didn’t stop me but it wasted too much of my time.

LOVEFILM: I’ve been pretty happy with this DVD rental service but we don’t use it enough so I want to cancel. Guess what? Although I can upgrade my package online, I have to ring a phone number to cancel it. This is just not good enough. Fortunately, my debit card expires this month so they can whistle if they think they’re going to get any more of my cash!

How it should be done

Contrast all this with the products of 37signals (the most famous of which is BaseCamp) . If you want to cancel one of their products, simply click a link, acknowledge that your data will be deleted and it’s done.

The lesson? Before I sign up for any product in the future, I will make sure I know how to cancel it. If it involves a phone call/opportunity for their sales team to attempt to persuade me to stay, I won’t choose them.

Let me know of any examples of this you come across.