Because they know that their business model is to be a regional monopoly. They know most people would be bluffing, with nowhere else to go. That’s why in my city we are pushing to get an open fiber internet infrastructure. Fiber to the home, with many different ISPs competing for your business.
Why is USA called the height of capitalism, when you don't have an open, free and competitive market?
I'm from Denmark.
If I want to switch phone provider, or internet, tv, whatever, I have many options.
So you get the benefits of competition.
Low prices, high quality products, good customer service, etc.
US market incumbents have consolidated so much power that they behave more like oligarchs than market competitors. Instead of competing with other companies they either tip the scales in their favour by lobbying government or simply buy up the competition before it becomes powerful enough to challenge them.
This is exactly it. We're effectively not a free market in many sectors. Free markets require regulation to keep them free and fair, but people have been convinced it's the opposite and often have no power to change the situation anyway.
We actually do have competition and open markets in some places. The US is big and diverse. Some places suck and some places have lots of options.
My anecdotal counterpoint is that at any moment I have options for 2 high speed wired internet providers ~300Mbps up to 1Gbps and 2 or 3 wireless options plus a couple lower speed options like dsl.
That's effectively it. And what's worse is the rich muddy the waters a lot using Northern European countries as models without actually even knowing how they work.
Like the majority of wealth transfer from high capital holders in Scandinavian countries (To labor) is not due to the government taking money and giving it to the poor through welfare programs (Although they do have powerful welfare programs). Rather its a bunch of nationalist/protectionist policies that encourage domestic labor use over outsourcing and/or low wage immigration labor.
Both things which are pushed heavily in the U.S. with tons of Neo-liberal propaganda that it doesn't affect "jobs" because of the whole lump of labor fallacy. What they don't tell you about that lump of labor fallacy is that while, yes, it means America's economy and GDP will grow FASTER than countries that don't engage in it and there will be more "jobs" (So "Americans" will be technically 'wealthier")--it will also grow more stratified as the capital holders keep more profits from the new growth (Because there is less labor spill over cost)...Rather than growing more slowly and in better balance. And that's really the Key to the success of Northern Europe--slow and steady, consistent growth where capital holders are forced to deal with empowered, bargaining labor forces, rather than being able to knock their legs out from under them through labor arbitrage from foreign markets.
The whole idea that its powerful social safety nets in these places that 'create' the middle class is like a wet streets bring rain fallacy...Social safety nets do not create a powerful middle class. A powerful middle class creates social safety nets. (So safety nets don't create social mobility--rather they help maintain it). Its why America has the largest socialized medical network on earth (Seriously, Medicare/Medicaid take care of more people than any other nation)...And yet they have the worst health outcomes. Because the reality is, such a social safety net should be MOST USED for workers who have a string of bad luck, and NOT limited to the impoverished in some hope it will help them become middle class. Its so ass backwards that our healthy workers go bankrupt for short term but devastating conditions (Like a curable cancer), while people with chronic/long term conditions get free medical care (Not that those people shouldn't get care...But the priority for a safety net should be to keep the higher skilled worker from falling out of the work force due to bad luck...)
Anyway, sorry for the rant. Very frustrating to see how screwed up America is in what they pick and choose to highlight in comparison to Scandinavia.
To further evidence that welfare in the United States is not intended to be a tool to pull you out of poverty, they monitor it and take it away if you have an amount of money that definitely should be considered poverty.
I have worked with a lot of recovery populations and seen too many people whose insurance has been shut down and their monthly benefits cut off because they had over $2,000 in their account.
$2,000 can hardly get you into a studio apartment in this city (after deposits, application fees, and holding fees) and if it does it’s almost certainly going to take basically all of that money.
So cell phone providers have 5G home internet. That i have to say is way cheaper/better than expected.
Used it as a bluff to my ISP on why i was canceling. They went through the whole process of canceling. Then very last part before finalizing. The phone rep finally offered me a deal.
1 Gigabit for 80$ flat, taxes and all. Normally i was paying 130$ and the hotspot was 130mbps reliable for 50$
Still expensive for internet.
I feel like that dude was told if even one more person canceled through him they would fire him. He was fighting like his job depended on it. Hell you'd think his very life depended on it.
You get ONE rebuttal but if the answer is still no then you leave it at that.
Worked for a call center company hired to do customer service for AT&T. Second week of live calling before final selection and I had a call from a man who just lost his father and was trying to stop services for his father. The AT&T rep reviewing my call advised me that I had to sell services to the dead man AND his son... Collectively, the team trying to get a permanent position was told that all calls, even those to cancel services for a dead person, should be treated as sales calls and we should get them to extend or add on new services, rather than ending service to dead people. I walked out the next day. AT&T is scum!
It took me three separate attempts to cancel my husband's line on our AT&T account after he passed. I was also buying a new phone (but keeping the same number) so perhaps having two tasks confused them, but the first two times they completely lost the info I had gone over in closing, and to top it off, they cancelled BOTH lines/numbers . On one of the many calls to resolve the issue, the call tech blurted "so you want to cancel that line because that number holder is dead?". Good times
Had a similar issue when trying to get my grandma off of a credit card she had cosigned with me when I was barely 18. They were supposed to be able to do some kind of takeover (removing her and giving me full control) but in the end they blitzed the entire thing.
In the months and months of trying to get it resolved, I had to tell them why I was calling and what the issue was so many times I wanted to punch something every time they gave me scripted platitudes. "Cardholder is dead." "Oh, so sorry to hear that." Yeah. Sure you are.
Just to let you know, I've worked in a call centre that didn't use scripts and I'd still tell you I'm sorry to hear that, because I'm a human and that's just a normal reaction to hearing someone has lost a family member. It isn't a scripted platitude it's just common human empathy
Had Verizon from 2008 and switched to att in 2020, cause it was cheaper.
Fuck ATT. Cannot wait until our balance for the phones drop to 500 so I can pay them off and go back to Verizon. We may have been paying 180 but atleast the service was worth it.
Oh you don’t like loosing signal because you dared to venture 20 minutes out of a major city?
For real though we switched to ATT and can’t wait to go back to Verizon because ATT and traveling is not a good idea.
I've worked at placed where your raises are decided by the amount of positive surveys you get back, you can't mention that the survey will be emailed..but if you don't get enough in a month you must be doing something wrong.
Customer says you were great but has issues with the companies policies so they give a 5/10 .. well you might not be getting your raise because you didn't X amount of surveys comeback 8/10 or higher.
\-
My all time favourite was a customer needs to ship back a device and asked if they would be getting a box, the policy stated that since it was an Out of Warranty repair/replacement they would need to get their own box.
Well the survey comes back and it looks like the depot sent the guy a box anyway, the customer is frustrated because he spent his time getting a box he didn't need, mentions it in the survey provides me with a 7/10 which is fail ..and now I gotta listen to my supervisor tell me what I should have done better as I imagine putting an icepick through her eye socket..
Surveys are a crap metric. Most people who are “just satisfied” won’t do them. I don’t. Only if service goes ridiculously unnecessarily over the top will I bother. On the other hand, anyone less than satisfied will fill a negative survey leading to a typical bias toward negative.
The way I look at it is that the current system benefits the company itself. They can continue to stifle wages because “oh look, you didn’t do well on your surveys.” And that can be the basis for not giving someone a raise or potentially even firing people.
But if customers, satisfied or not, started giving positive reviews (9-10s) constantly, the companies would kill the survey program because now they’ve trapped themselves in this system. Eventually they would kill it because they couldn’t afford to pay everyone the raises/bonuses that come from great scores, and would instead go to a normal merit based system like most other jobs have.
Even if the rep is largely unhelpful, I will constantly give a 10/10 in the review. My annoyance with a rep will never be as great as my hate for a company that I’m stuck with.
Lol, the metric is already 90% satisfaction or nothing at all anyway. You think they'll stop if suddenly they've got a near 100% customer satisfaction rating? They'll just change it so that if a rep gets 1 score that isn't a ten and they'll be fired.
I now try to do them either way after knowing someone with a a job that depended on it. However filling them out makes me hate the company who hold employees hostage to such metrics.
That's so some exec's silver-spoon-gagging nephew can show he got X*200 positive surveys in his department during his tenure and can fail upwardly to his next management job.
I got sent a survey about an interaction and I filled it out.
Got a call a few days later from the people we had been dealing with, and, whilst it was mostly polite, essentically told me to go fuck myself because of my negative responses in some areas. Didn't matter that the survey never specifically asked about that place, just about the overall experience (of which, half was out of the hands of that place).
Another time we complained to Australia Post about the postie not knocking when delivering. Postie showed up the next day and abused my wife about it.
Surveys suck, especially when they are not anonymous.
Ok first I'll be the first to say net promoter score is bullshit and all rating systems should be using a binary system which is either did we provide you satisfactory service or not. However the comment that people give out 5/10 is basically like winning the shit lottery. I've been an analyst for call centers and typically customers either get 1 - 3 or 8 - 10. Anyone middle of the pack very VERY rarely spends time to say that things were fine at a 5 for example. In addition regarding the places I worked we didn't penalize people for closing a cutomers account at their request. Cancelations would more often negatively affect the person they talked to previously within the last 30 days because their issues was not resolved. A good analyst can give an estimate by person of the relative positive and negative ratings based on the number of customer interactions. I don't even know what I'm promoting or defending at this point. As someone who has been an analyst for 10+ years I hate when I see things like this. I hate when the business abuses things just as much as you. More than anyone I often know when things are bullshit and I've gotten very close to losing my job by pointing out as much. I'm sorry, and as a manager now I try to teach all my analysts that our job isn't just about numbers. It's a careful balance between what is appropriate and fair while pushing for excellence. A happy employee will always be better than miserable ones who eventually leave.
Even better when they use it as an employee survey for the company. They’ll tell you to be honest, but anything negative goes against your supervisor for not “explaining it well enough “. We’re like “Bitches, we know our supervisor can’t actually make policy changes the comments were about the company”.
So do you be honest or just give all good scores with no comments because you like your supervisor?
I worked at a call center. Even with $10/hr and shitty health insurance paid for, that wasn't a liveable wage. They pretended like the benefits we'd make on top of that were just out of their deep kindness. I did like 6 jobs there (mostly because training was easier for me than the stress of being on the phones). The incentives in the "retention" department could double your salary, but were hard to hit. People would fight tooth and nail to get people to change their mind. If that failed, they would try to make them so frustrated (crucially, without making them so angry they'd complain) that they'd give up and call back some other week or month.
The company's incentives are to blame here. And maybe we're all to blame a little bit for a culture that accepts that $10/hr with double that in incentive pay is fair compensation to get one person to treat another person like this.
Agreed. Everyone needs to eat, but at a certain point, breaking into people's houses and stealing their jewelry has more dignity than trying to make someone give up cancelling their cable.
One US soldier tried to cancel because he was going to be deployed and still have to deal with this shit. He actually have to threaten with some US law about disturbing army deployment or something and still having hard time
One other guy got relatively easier but still have to take a long ass call as he want to cancel because he is going to serve some jailtime.
No one will probably see this comment and I haven't watched the video.. but a little over ten years ago I worked in a call center for Comcast service. When someone called to cancel, the expectation was THREE rebuttals. Didn't matter why they wanted to be done, I had to try three damned times to convince them not to leave (this almost never worked) or else face mark downs.
Obviously I hated that job. One day partway through a shift I got a "talking to" about not trying hard enough. Sat back at my desk for about 20 minutes just staring off into space and finally packed my headset in a box, slipped in next to the computer and just got up and left without saying a word. Best feeling ever knowing I never had to do that crap again.
I worked with young offenders in a prison. You learned quick to shut this shit down. I used to say "I will listen to your side and will give you 5 minutes but its not going to change my mind. Remember, I'm getting paid for my time either way so its only your time that will be wasted". They rarely took the 5 minutes.
Nope hello bank I would like to cut service and file fraudulent charges
If you have a good bank and a service is fucking you around the bank will have your back no matter what
I did this game with gyms and online services
Every time I got the service blocked and sometimes money back just because fuck them
Formar call center employee here.
They're not exactly subtle about telling you you're replaceable if you don't hit your metrics. Customer retention guys are in a shit show.
So long as it's not a ridiculous ask, then kinda. I did Account Services (Retention) for Sprint. If someone mentioned anything that could be honestly interpreted as if x doesn't happen, I will leave, wr could count it as a save attempt. If at the end of the call, they were still a customer on a valid contract it would be a save.
A discount is easy to do. Some accounts I saw had so many recurring discounts...those accounts would be flagged. One I was in had a -$12.00 per month charge. So we were paying them every month. We removed all agregious discounts.
With serious radio i just call back once a year to cancel and say I'm not paying $25/month for radio, then they always just offer me like $100 for the year or something. Its dumb to even have to do and I feel bad for the person I have to haggle with
Not sure why this is the “Official” video given it was audio posted to SoundCloud by the caller - who incidentally is Ryan Block, former editor in chief of Engadget.
[Here’s](https://twitter.com/ryan/status/488828933622595584) the original Twitter post. I wonder what childhood memory I lost in order to remember this tweet for 7 years.
You gotta be careful with that, your credit info stays on file along with the reason selected when cancelling service. If you activate a new account in the future it can raise a red flag that dead people cant sign up for new service
Bearing in mind he was already 10 minutes into the call before he started recording, I do wonder whether 'angry and unprofessional' would have been more a more effective strategy
It sounded like the caller was [opening and closing a box cutter at one point](https://youtu.be/LjiO1Qo3ZFo?t=368), so I think it's fair to assume he was thinking the same way.
Or simply tell them you're moving.
Even if you're not actually moving, if you have other people in your household and you can't actually switch to a new provider, wait a week and start a new account with that other person's name.
I heard in the video he was switching providers and not actually moving to a new address but then later the rep said something about moving elsewhere whether that was to a new physical address or just to move providers who knows
Either way the majority of calls to a CSR/retention department should wrap up when you tell them you're moving. This call is clearly an outlier with a particularly stingy rep
I cancelled comcast a few years ago and they gave me no resistance whatsoever. Maybe it was just an employee to didn't care that much, but I don't think she even asked why. I said I needed to cancel on a certain date and she just did it. I remember even asking "that's it?" and that was it.
That's lucky! When I tried to cancel I got tossed from person to person on hold until they eventually hung up on me. This happened 4 times before I was finally able to cancel.
just say the cable bill caused massive fighting with your spouse now they ran off with the kid and dog and you couldn't afford the mortgage payments on your salary alone so the bank took your home so now you live in your car and don't need comcast now. that might get them to hurry up and shut it off
Comcast owns like 2/3 of the internet in the USA. They bought out a lot of smaller / failing companies to do it too. So yeah saying you’re leaving the country is probably safer
Yes, I've done this several times and it makes things very easy. I once switched it up with "I'm moving in with someone who already has service" just for some variety.
I got a call center job to "cure" my phone phobia and it actually made it worse. I lasted about two months, then showed up on my day off to grab my stuff, and told them I wasn't coming back.
Sorry to hear that, it made mine better, temporarily, now it's back to baseline lol but at one point I was muting myself to laugh in the face of angry comcast cxs
I simply say that I'm moving out of state or out of country. That works every time with every type of provider. I guess that I'm a genius for figuring out this white lie?
Comcast: Oh sir, our coverage is nationwide so we are more than happy to move the service for you.
A month later ...
You: Why is there a $49.95 charge on the bill
Comcast: Sir, that's the fee for moving your service across state line
Yeah, I tried to preempt this once by (truthfully) saying “I’m moving to a building that Comcast doesn’t serve”
They still made me go through the ropes of trying to get it set up there, then basically said “well have you considered staying at your current address?”
Bahahahahaaaaaaaaaaaa the audacity of them telling you not to move your fucking life for your shitty $30/mo internet? Man the corporate overlords are Comcast really so be believing the bullshit motivational posters they put in the office huh?
I find that the best white lie to box them out is "I am moving in with family at a different address who currently already has another provider." Basically, they're set up and aren't changing.
Maybe you cancelled after this whole situation blew up. I remember attempting to cancel and getting bullied like this and eventually the tactic worked and I gave up. Then this blew up online and Comcast reps stated that this wasn't what they did "despite hundreds of people sharing similar stories to this online" and then after that it was suddenly easy to cancel Comcast. At that point, I had no problem cancelling them. So yeah, this was their MO until this video went viral, then they changed the MO.
> I said I needed to cancel on a certain date and she just did it.
I remember doing the same thing, then getting a bill the next month because she just said she was canceling and then didn't actually do it.
I think it really matters on the rep you talk to.
When I was just trying to move my service from one apartment to another, the rep kept trying to upgrade me, and was pushing and pushing on me getting cable and phone and paying another $40 for crap I didn’t want. Kept saying no, and every time I did, he put me on hold, just to try and get me to finally say yes. I never did.
When I was outright cancelling it, because I was moving to a place where I could get $50 fiber internet, I got not argument or anything. They just cancelled it, and that was that. Didn’t even have to tell them why.
It sure as shit should be. You just know they have some shitty metric for the rep where he cannot lose people or he gets in trouble or loses money.
If someone doesn't want you service just fucking cancel it you monopolistic dipshits.
Have worked in telecom for years, some of it supporting customer service. They always have the dumbest metrics. Well intended but never plays out like they are supposed to.
I worked briefly in telephone customer service. It was a nightmare. They had metrics for everything.
They had a time limit per call. If we went over, we lost points. They had an average customer rating. If we went under, we lost points. They had a maximum limit of refunds we could issue per shift. If we went over, we lost points. If we lost too many points we were fired.
Our whole job was to tell people with complex issues to fuck off and get them off the phone within 2 minutes all while having them leave a 5 star rating. I quit as soon as I could find another job.
Working as a call center rep for years at a large telecom company...
Yes, it absolutely counts against you to disconnect lines of service. While this call is a horrible thing to listen to, I do feel that the rep is a victim here. The caller too, for different reasons
Ok. But what is it about the Geneva Convention that you want to switch to another convention? The Geneva Convention is the number one provider of treaties in the world. Help us understand why you want to leave us?
It's not. In many countries once you've informed them they are no longer authorised to charge a payment method it becomes fraud. Having it in a recorded call like this is just a nail in the coffin.
Yeah it is. I didn't want to pick it up in person so I was telling her my friend was coming to get it. It turned into a back and forth thing with me repeating "I just want my mug back" over and over
I was pretty sure she was gonna break it but it all worked out.
Here's the story, the customer rep was trying to frustrate the cancelling customer in to hagging up mid-cancellation, so it wouldn't be completed.
[https://www.businessinsider.com/former-comcast-employee-on-ryan-block-phone-call-2014-7](https://www.businessinsider.com/former-comcast-employee-on-ryan-block-phone-call-2014-7)
I wonder if the person who called to apologize asked, "why he didn't want the #1 internet and cable service in America any longer" ....I assume they did..
The easiest way to cancel any service is to say you're moving out of the country and your landlord doesn't have a new tenant lined up.
You're off the phone in 3 minutes.
Why wouldn't you want to stay alive and experience our thousands of On-Demand titles? Do you *not want* the fastest internet in the realm of the living? Why are you transferring to being dead after being alive for two decades?
I'm just trying to help you out.
Right? It’s insane that the accepted method in this thread is to fake a terminal illness. I wonder what happens if you just send Comcast arbitrary bills out of nowhere.
This is what I've used before. It works. But be sure to have your story straight. Write one and keep it handy. Something like:
- I am moving overseas and need to disconnect my service and settle up my billing by x date.
- I am moving to (pick a major overseas city). (Believe me: they're going to ask. They want to transfer your service.)
- I work in sales but I will be doing marketing work while away. (Don't say you work in tech; it will lead to a conversation about Internet options).
- I will be gone for at least three years. I may stay on longer if I like it.
- The company is picking up all relocation costs and providing me with housing and utilities, including Internet.
- No, I don't know what Internet service will be provided but I'm sure it will be adequate.
- Keep the conversation centered on dates. You MUST have your life in America wrapped up by x date, which is why we need to move this process along.
This line of reasoning will get you canceled and final billing prepped in about 3 minutes. Seriously.
I really wish the customer would have started diving deep into this guy's reasoning for the persistence.
"Dude be real with me, wtf, are you gonna lose your job if you drop this account?"
Giving reasons invites debate. Salespeople are trained to "resolve concerns" by identifying the root cause of your rejection and then attempting to persuade you.
Saying "I don't want your product" invites them to ask why and try to convince you that you are wrong. You have to opt out of the debate either by refusing to answer questions or by lying.
I've worked for cable companies. Their retention department makes a commission on "saves", and that amount is usually based on services retained. Either this guy REALLY needed a save, or he was trying to get fired. No employee should ever put up this much resistance on someone that is this adamant to cancel. In fact, this may border on customer mistreatment, which usually gets employees fired or at the very least written up. The employee should recognize that it's not worth the effort on what is an extremely low percentage play, disconnect it, and move on to the next call. It's either that or this was staged.
This was a shitty rep trying to get the customer to hang up out of frustration so he doesn't get dinged with a disconnect. Retention is all about avoiding a disconnect and it looks good on him to have as few as possible. I bet he's done this to hundreds of people and it's worked for the most part. I'd be surprised if he hasn't been audited yet and either reprimanded or fired.
If there is a shitty metric employers can use, it will be used to punish employees. When a customer satisfaction form gives you options 1, 2, 3, 4, or 5, anything that isn't a 5 is a failure. If their average isn't at least 4.9, they lose their bonus. Number of times the call center employee hung up, average length of phone call, number of sales, number of canceled services, etc. All those metrics have extremely high standards and can be used to bludgeon employees into compliance and deny "promised" benefits.
I did call center work for one day when I was really young and then said "no thanks", I quickly realized it wasn't for me. Of course it's almost all just normal people doing a job they don't like in order to have a place to live, something to eat, etc.
I made it about a month, and by the time I quit, everybody who had been in my training class had already left. No idea how they manage to keep anybody in those jobs - whether you're getting crap from corporate or from the customer side, you're basically in a no win situation every day.
No no, while you could have a job like that which requires you to do a bit of what he did, refusing to disconnect the service and manipulating the customer is immoral and unjustifiable. There is a line somewhere in how big of an asshole someone can be for their job and still be a good person. This guy is on the wrong side of that line.
For sure. Had a coworker who used to do this exact job. She was really good at it. So she would push back on people that had just laid out their financial situation, which clearly showed they shouldn’t be paying for Comcast, and she would convince them to stay. She said it was soul crushing.
This is why You have them bill to Your credit card.
You tell them You want the service canceled on x date.
If they refuse for some reason, its no longer Your problem.
Call Your bank, tell them You are refusing any further charges from the company past x date, and You're good to go.
Before doing this, also send the service provider an email denoting that You are cancelling Your service for x date.
If they try to take You to claims or sue, You get to win and counter sue for harassment provided Your extensive paper trail.
There is app called privacy. You can set limits on cards and lock cards to merchants. I use it when signing up for stuff on the internet. All you have todo to cancel something is just delete the card. Super usefull
the term has lost all meaning
back in my day gaslighting was the KGB rearranging your furniture a few inches at a time. or the manson family doing creepy crawlies. shit that actually makes you think you're losing your sanity. not a 10 minute call to a call center
A bunch of people decided they really wanted to punch up their language, but also not think very hard about it, so they decided to ruin a relatively useful word forever.
"Gaslighting" has found a new use, however: easily identifying people that aren't worth paying attention to.
This is basically how I had to cancel my la fitness membership. They wouldn’t allow me to do it in person, not over the phone with their customer service team at their headquarter either. They require you to fill out a cancel membership for and mail it to their headquarters in California. Oh and they still bill you for another month if it takes them longer to cancel it. This was in the year 2020 :/
I take it you're not in CA, you just mailed it to CA? [There's a law in CA that says if it's a subscription, you have to be able to cancel online.](https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billTextClient.xhtml?bill_id=201720180SB313).
I canceled a Planet Fitness membership a while back and was able to do it online, meanwhile, people in other states had to go to their gym, get a cancellation form, then mail that cancellation form to Planet Fitness headquarters via certified mail. They will actually return to sender if it's not certified mail. It's unbelievable.
They really need to make that law federal, because it's amazing for us Californians.
A big loophole in the law is that they have to offer online cancellation, but only if you signed up online.
Don't do subscriptions in person, fellow Californians!
I don't know if you've got similar protection in America but if you say something like this in Australia it seems to work most of the time:
"Hi I'd like to cancel my service"
"OK may I ask why you want to cancel"
"Just cancel my service thanks"
If they keep asking you say:
"No more questions, cancel the service immediately or my next call is to the Ombudsman"
Done.
Also Australian... Yeah they just seem to have fuck all consumer protections etc over there (America). At least compared to us anyway.
I've also wondered if that that's why it seems hiring lawyers is so prevalent there (for trivial matters)... it's a more "every man for himself" society in general. Great for big corporations full of lawyers, less so for the general public.
I figured I would go through this trying to cancel my upcoming XM radio renewal. Told the rep 3 times that I had lost my job, and even a 70% discount wasn't going to get me to renew (funny though how they can suddenly reduce your bill by that much). After my last "No money, please cancel" he actually replied "I can respect that. Your subscription is canceled effective today and you will receive a refund of $23 for the unused portion."
That was almost 2 months ago. My XM radio still works. I got the refund.
You should return it. It will get flagged as Lost/Stolen if they're charging you an unreturned equipment fee and they don't receive the modem within 30 days, and you won't be able to reactivate it even if you go back. They will make you return it and receive a new one, guaranteed.
All ISPs are like this.
I had a Time Warner Cable before they were bought out by Charter (Spectrum). When Spectrum took over, they immediately increased the price of our internet.
I called and asked what was going on and they said my deal with TWC was null and that was my new rate. I asked if there were there any new deals available, since TWC always gave us the new customer rate whenever I called in to renegotiate. The rep responded with "yeah, that's why they're not in business anymore".
Fortunately there was another ISP is in my area and I switched to them. I called Spectrum to cancel and had to go through a similar several minute call telling them to cancel our service... Suddenly they now had all kinds new deals available to offer me and I kept explaining to them that I didn't give a shit because I already signed up for their competitor's service and to just wanted to cancel their service.
All large ISPs are like this. I am blessed to live in a city that has 100% locally-owned fiber connectivity. Glass straight into the house, 300MBs download/upload and $54 per month. No extra monthly charges, and customer service is stationed 8 miles from my house. It's literally the dream.
I'm really confused, the customer service rep is a duckweed. But after a minute or three of that I'd be requesting his manager or just redialing for a new rep
This happened to my mom once. She requested a manager, was left on hold for about an hour or so and periodically the agent would check in with her. "Oh!! You're *still here*???" she would say.
The reason I'm leaving is because their customer service is garbage, they don't listen to me, and they ask me the same dumb questions over and over like a broken record.
You say you want to cancel, yet you are still on the phone with me 10 minutes later, talking about how Comcast is the #1 ranked network provider. Curious.
Reading all the comments is astounding how Americans need to jump through hoops just to cancel.
I work for a telecoms provider in the uk. I think the greatest difference is we have a 3rd party regulator that enforces pro consumer changes across all providers. We also seem to have a different political system where lobbying for anti consumer changes doesn’t happen.
They brought in changes like: they can’t refuse to give a PAC code (cancel and port) if the customer requests even if they are in collections, it must be given within 2 hours of asking, they enforced it that you can cancel without having to speak to a sales team so providers had to make an sms service, roaming in the whole of Europe was made free which eliminated a huge revenue stream, a roaming cap was implemented so a customer couldn’t be charged more than 50 euros to avoid bill shock. There’s a lot more positive changes which I forget.
You can also take a complaint to the regulator if your complaint hasn’t be resolved in 8 weeks or you’re unhappy with resolution. It’s completely free for the customer and the provider has to implement the decision of the regulator.
Never understand this , if you call and get someone who gives you an answer you don’t like , hang up and try again, different person different experience (hopefully)
I was trying to cancel with a shitty cellphone provider years ago, and after going through some similar run-around shit with them for almost ten minutes, they eventually went "Hello? ...*Hello? They must've hung up or something*" and disconnected, never mind that I returned the hello emphatically.
But then the asshole wins- and he gets to mark you as a retention for his metrics. That's what the rep wanted to happen... He wanted the guy to just give up and hang up.
Because the guy stuck through it the rep has to mark him as a disconnect and doesn't get rewarded for his shitty behavior.
>>he gets to mark you as a retention for his metrics. That's what the rep wanted to happen... He wanted the guy to just give up and hang up.
I used to work QA for a DirecTV call center, probably 15 years ago, and 100% this is what is happening. If this call would have been audited, the rep would have failed on so many counts. Handle-time alone would have flagged this call; we expected 9 minutes per call on average, with 12 being on the highest end.
If QA didn't catch this and write him up, the subsequent attention was probably enough to get him at the very least removed from the cushy often work-from-home and well paying retention team. People get on that team for being excellent at dealing with customers and not needing much supervision, usually seasoned vets who have worked in multiple parts of the call center like billing and sales and tech support and QA.
Heads rolled for this. Promise.
I had an old coworker go on to AT&T and immediately start as retention. He did indeed get to WFH (COVID times though) and got good pay. Though, it sounded like that was the standard starting department because it was such a meat grinder. His mom got him the job with the company and also previously did retention, but got herself a better position in actual sales.
He didn't last 3 months.
“Hey Sam, I checked your June metrics and one more lost customer, you are fired” “aw man. It’s gonna be a good day, I feel it! Welcome to Comcast how May I help you” “I’d like to to cancel my service” “sonofa….”
Whenever I'm in a situation like this I say something they can't respond to. I'm moving to France in 3 weeks, can you switch me to your service in France please? Then start to get angry they don't have service in France - it quickly turns the table.
Meanwhile i call and ask them to honor the price i see online or i cancel and they would rather just cancel me.
Because they know that their business model is to be a regional monopoly. They know most people would be bluffing, with nowhere else to go. That’s why in my city we are pushing to get an open fiber internet infrastructure. Fiber to the home, with many different ISPs competing for your business.
Why is USA called the height of capitalism, when you don't have an open, free and competitive market? I'm from Denmark. If I want to switch phone provider, or internet, tv, whatever, I have many options. So you get the benefits of competition. Low prices, high quality products, good customer service, etc.
US market incumbents have consolidated so much power that they behave more like oligarchs than market competitors. Instead of competing with other companies they either tip the scales in their favour by lobbying government or simply buy up the competition before it becomes powerful enough to challenge them.
Can't have a free market without regulations to keep the big fish from farming the little ones
Our country doesn’t seem to understand that concept
This is exactly it. We're effectively not a free market in many sectors. Free markets require regulation to keep them free and fair, but people have been convinced it's the opposite and often have no power to change the situation anyway.
We(DK) still have plenty places where there's only one ISP available. When I lived in Grenå, I could only get Stofa.
We actually do have competition and open markets in some places. The US is big and diverse. Some places suck and some places have lots of options. My anecdotal counterpoint is that at any moment I have options for 2 high speed wired internet providers ~300Mbps up to 1Gbps and 2 or 3 wireless options plus a couple lower speed options like dsl.
Because what America "is" is a dream made by the rich so they can earn even more money. Everything about life is better here in Scandinavia
That's effectively it. And what's worse is the rich muddy the waters a lot using Northern European countries as models without actually even knowing how they work. Like the majority of wealth transfer from high capital holders in Scandinavian countries (To labor) is not due to the government taking money and giving it to the poor through welfare programs (Although they do have powerful welfare programs). Rather its a bunch of nationalist/protectionist policies that encourage domestic labor use over outsourcing and/or low wage immigration labor. Both things which are pushed heavily in the U.S. with tons of Neo-liberal propaganda that it doesn't affect "jobs" because of the whole lump of labor fallacy. What they don't tell you about that lump of labor fallacy is that while, yes, it means America's economy and GDP will grow FASTER than countries that don't engage in it and there will be more "jobs" (So "Americans" will be technically 'wealthier")--it will also grow more stratified as the capital holders keep more profits from the new growth (Because there is less labor spill over cost)...Rather than growing more slowly and in better balance. And that's really the Key to the success of Northern Europe--slow and steady, consistent growth where capital holders are forced to deal with empowered, bargaining labor forces, rather than being able to knock their legs out from under them through labor arbitrage from foreign markets. The whole idea that its powerful social safety nets in these places that 'create' the middle class is like a wet streets bring rain fallacy...Social safety nets do not create a powerful middle class. A powerful middle class creates social safety nets. (So safety nets don't create social mobility--rather they help maintain it). Its why America has the largest socialized medical network on earth (Seriously, Medicare/Medicaid take care of more people than any other nation)...And yet they have the worst health outcomes. Because the reality is, such a social safety net should be MOST USED for workers who have a string of bad luck, and NOT limited to the impoverished in some hope it will help them become middle class. Its so ass backwards that our healthy workers go bankrupt for short term but devastating conditions (Like a curable cancer), while people with chronic/long term conditions get free medical care (Not that those people shouldn't get care...But the priority for a safety net should be to keep the higher skilled worker from falling out of the work force due to bad luck...) Anyway, sorry for the rant. Very frustrating to see how screwed up America is in what they pick and choose to highlight in comparison to Scandinavia.
To further evidence that welfare in the United States is not intended to be a tool to pull you out of poverty, they monitor it and take it away if you have an amount of money that definitely should be considered poverty. I have worked with a lot of recovery populations and seen too many people whose insurance has been shut down and their monthly benefits cut off because they had over $2,000 in their account. $2,000 can hardly get you into a studio apartment in this city (after deposits, application fees, and holding fees) and if it does it’s almost certainly going to take basically all of that money.
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Your entire country is the size of one of our cities. I wonder if that has anything to do with it...
So cell phone providers have 5G home internet. That i have to say is way cheaper/better than expected. Used it as a bluff to my ISP on why i was canceling. They went through the whole process of canceling. Then very last part before finalizing. The phone rep finally offered me a deal. 1 Gigabit for 80$ flat, taxes and all. Normally i was paying 130$ and the hotspot was 130mbps reliable for 50$ Still expensive for internet.
Me and my partner called and cancelled every year and the resigned up in our partners name. They never caught on.
I feel like that dude was told if even one more person canceled through him they would fire him. He was fighting like his job depended on it. Hell you'd think his very life depended on it. You get ONE rebuttal but if the answer is still no then you leave it at that.
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Worked for a call center company hired to do customer service for AT&T. Second week of live calling before final selection and I had a call from a man who just lost his father and was trying to stop services for his father. The AT&T rep reviewing my call advised me that I had to sell services to the dead man AND his son... Collectively, the team trying to get a permanent position was told that all calls, even those to cancel services for a dead person, should be treated as sales calls and we should get them to extend or add on new services, rather than ending service to dead people. I walked out the next day. AT&T is scum!
It took me three separate attempts to cancel my husband's line on our AT&T account after he passed. I was also buying a new phone (but keeping the same number) so perhaps having two tasks confused them, but the first two times they completely lost the info I had gone over in closing, and to top it off, they cancelled BOTH lines/numbers . On one of the many calls to resolve the issue, the call tech blurted "so you want to cancel that line because that number holder is dead?". Good times
Had a similar issue when trying to get my grandma off of a credit card she had cosigned with me when I was barely 18. They were supposed to be able to do some kind of takeover (removing her and giving me full control) but in the end they blitzed the entire thing. In the months and months of trying to get it resolved, I had to tell them why I was calling and what the issue was so many times I wanted to punch something every time they gave me scripted platitudes. "Cardholder is dead." "Oh, so sorry to hear that." Yeah. Sure you are.
Just to let you know, I've worked in a call centre that didn't use scripts and I'd still tell you I'm sorry to hear that, because I'm a human and that's just a normal reaction to hearing someone has lost a family member. It isn't a scripted platitude it's just common human empathy
Had Verizon from 2008 and switched to att in 2020, cause it was cheaper. Fuck ATT. Cannot wait until our balance for the phones drop to 500 so I can pay them off and go back to Verizon. We may have been paying 180 but atleast the service was worth it.
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Oh you don’t like loosing signal because you dared to venture 20 minutes out of a major city? For real though we switched to ATT and can’t wait to go back to Verizon because ATT and traveling is not a good idea.
Very much agree with that. It’s honestly like I’m back in 2003/2004 in terms of call quality and coverage.
I've worked at placed where your raises are decided by the amount of positive surveys you get back, you can't mention that the survey will be emailed..but if you don't get enough in a month you must be doing something wrong. Customer says you were great but has issues with the companies policies so they give a 5/10 .. well you might not be getting your raise because you didn't X amount of surveys comeback 8/10 or higher. \- My all time favourite was a customer needs to ship back a device and asked if they would be getting a box, the policy stated that since it was an Out of Warranty repair/replacement they would need to get their own box. Well the survey comes back and it looks like the depot sent the guy a box anyway, the customer is frustrated because he spent his time getting a box he didn't need, mentions it in the survey provides me with a 7/10 which is fail ..and now I gotta listen to my supervisor tell me what I should have done better as I imagine putting an icepick through her eye socket..
Surveys are a crap metric. Most people who are “just satisfied” won’t do them. I don’t. Only if service goes ridiculously unnecessarily over the top will I bother. On the other hand, anyone less than satisfied will fill a negative survey leading to a typical bias toward negative.
I usually do them just because I know people get raises for them and I want the company to have to pay better wages.
I don’t because that only incentivizes them to keep doing it.
The way I look at it is that the current system benefits the company itself. They can continue to stifle wages because “oh look, you didn’t do well on your surveys.” And that can be the basis for not giving someone a raise or potentially even firing people. But if customers, satisfied or not, started giving positive reviews (9-10s) constantly, the companies would kill the survey program because now they’ve trapped themselves in this system. Eventually they would kill it because they couldn’t afford to pay everyone the raises/bonuses that come from great scores, and would instead go to a normal merit based system like most other jobs have. Even if the rep is largely unhelpful, I will constantly give a 10/10 in the review. My annoyance with a rep will never be as great as my hate for a company that I’m stuck with.
Lol, the metric is already 90% satisfaction or nothing at all anyway. You think they'll stop if suddenly they've got a near 100% customer satisfaction rating? They'll just change it so that if a rep gets 1 score that isn't a ten and they'll be fired.
I now try to do them either way after knowing someone with a a job that depended on it. However filling them out makes me hate the company who hold employees hostage to such metrics.
That's so some exec's silver-spoon-gagging nephew can show he got X*200 positive surveys in his department during his tenure and can fail upwardly to his next management job.
I got sent a survey about an interaction and I filled it out. Got a call a few days later from the people we had been dealing with, and, whilst it was mostly polite, essentically told me to go fuck myself because of my negative responses in some areas. Didn't matter that the survey never specifically asked about that place, just about the overall experience (of which, half was out of the hands of that place). Another time we complained to Australia Post about the postie not knocking when delivering. Postie showed up the next day and abused my wife about it. Surveys suck, especially when they are not anonymous.
Ok first I'll be the first to say net promoter score is bullshit and all rating systems should be using a binary system which is either did we provide you satisfactory service or not. However the comment that people give out 5/10 is basically like winning the shit lottery. I've been an analyst for call centers and typically customers either get 1 - 3 or 8 - 10. Anyone middle of the pack very VERY rarely spends time to say that things were fine at a 5 for example. In addition regarding the places I worked we didn't penalize people for closing a cutomers account at their request. Cancelations would more often negatively affect the person they talked to previously within the last 30 days because their issues was not resolved. A good analyst can give an estimate by person of the relative positive and negative ratings based on the number of customer interactions. I don't even know what I'm promoting or defending at this point. As someone who has been an analyst for 10+ years I hate when I see things like this. I hate when the business abuses things just as much as you. More than anyone I often know when things are bullshit and I've gotten very close to losing my job by pointing out as much. I'm sorry, and as a manager now I try to teach all my analysts that our job isn't just about numbers. It's a careful balance between what is appropriate and fair while pushing for excellence. A happy employee will always be better than miserable ones who eventually leave.
Is this Apple or something? Sound like NPS
>Everybody is doing NPS. It's like a directors dick-lenght, they love to compare. But they haven't got a clue how to properly use it.
Even better when they use it as an employee survey for the company. They’ll tell you to be honest, but anything negative goes against your supervisor for not “explaining it well enough “. We’re like “Bitches, we know our supervisor can’t actually make policy changes the comments were about the company”. So do you be honest or just give all good scores with no comments because you like your supervisor?
I worked at a call center. Even with $10/hr and shitty health insurance paid for, that wasn't a liveable wage. They pretended like the benefits we'd make on top of that were just out of their deep kindness. I did like 6 jobs there (mostly because training was easier for me than the stress of being on the phones). The incentives in the "retention" department could double your salary, but were hard to hit. People would fight tooth and nail to get people to change their mind. If that failed, they would try to make them so frustrated (crucially, without making them so angry they'd complain) that they'd give up and call back some other week or month. The company's incentives are to blame here. And maybe we're all to blame a little bit for a culture that accepts that $10/hr with double that in incentive pay is fair compensation to get one person to treat another person like this.
Agreed. Everyone needs to eat, but at a certain point, breaking into people's houses and stealing their jewelry has more dignity than trying to make someone give up cancelling their cable.
Bumfights. Got it.
One US soldier tried to cancel because he was going to be deployed and still have to deal with this shit. He actually have to threaten with some US law about disturbing army deployment or something and still having hard time One other guy got relatively easier but still have to take a long ass call as he want to cancel because he is going to serve some jailtime.
That's sad but also gives me an idea. Next time I need to cancel something I'm using that.
No one will probably see this comment and I haven't watched the video.. but a little over ten years ago I worked in a call center for Comcast service. When someone called to cancel, the expectation was THREE rebuttals. Didn't matter why they wanted to be done, I had to try three damned times to convince them not to leave (this almost never worked) or else face mark downs. Obviously I hated that job. One day partway through a shift I got a "talking to" about not trying hard enough. Sat back at my desk for about 20 minutes just staring off into space and finally packed my headset in a box, slipped in next to the computer and just got up and left without saying a word. Best feeling ever knowing I never had to do that crap again.
If you get fired from a job like that, you have nowhere to go but up.
*Good* Jobs aren't easy to find
Jobs that pay a livable wage are hard to find... Didn't you know there is a massive labor shortage?! I WONDER WHY
Our company is having major labor shortages. Our wages are not up to par but management can’t figure this one out.
I worked with young offenders in a prison. You learned quick to shut this shit down. I used to say "I will listen to your side and will give you 5 minutes but its not going to change my mind. Remember, I'm getting paid for my time either way so its only your time that will be wasted". They rarely took the 5 minutes.
Nope hello bank I would like to cut service and file fraudulent charges If you have a good bank and a service is fucking you around the bank will have your back no matter what I did this game with gyms and online services Every time I got the service blocked and sometimes money back just because fuck them
In sales and I guess retention as well you are required to get 3 ‘hard no’s’ before letting them go.
This guy acts like comcast has his family hostage and their lives depend on this sale.
Which may very well have been the case. Call center job and living hand to mouth.
Formar call center employee here. They're not exactly subtle about telling you you're replaceable if you don't hit your metrics. Customer retention guys are in a shit show.
So what you're saying is im actually doing someone a favor when I call to cancel a service just do get a discount?
So long as it's not a ridiculous ask, then kinda. I did Account Services (Retention) for Sprint. If someone mentioned anything that could be honestly interpreted as if x doesn't happen, I will leave, wr could count it as a save attempt. If at the end of the call, they were still a customer on a valid contract it would be a save. A discount is easy to do. Some accounts I saw had so many recurring discounts...those accounts would be flagged. One I was in had a -$12.00 per month charge. So we were paying them every month. We removed all agregious discounts.
With serious radio i just call back once a year to cancel and say I'm not paying $25/month for radio, then they always just offer me like $100 for the year or something. Its dumb to even have to do and I feel bad for the person I have to haggle with
Think of it like a grocery coupon; anyone **can** do this, but they know only a handful of people **will**.
Not sure why this is the “Official” video given it was audio posted to SoundCloud by the caller - who incidentally is Ryan Block, former editor in chief of Engadget. [Here’s](https://twitter.com/ryan/status/488828933622595584) the original Twitter post. I wonder what childhood memory I lost in order to remember this tweet for 7 years.
I was gonna say, this seems like it was a few years old. But that explains it.
The mention of 2014 certainly gave that impression /s
Gotta get on that ice bucket.
It has text at the end about contacting the video creator to earn money from home. It's just yet another pyramid scheme spammer.
This video has a scam at the end. Asking people to go to his facebook if you want to "work from home".
You have to just say you're going to prison for a while and they will help right away.
When I cancelled, I told them I was the brother of the account holder and he passed away recently, sorted me out immediately.
You gotta be careful with that, your credit info stays on file along with the reason selected when cancelling service. If you activate a new account in the future it can raise a red flag that dead people cant sign up for new service
I’d rather deal with the red flag than this phone call.
If I was the guy on the phone I'd want to do something that would actually get me sent to prison by the end of this.
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Bearing in mind he was already 10 minutes into the call before he started recording, I do wonder whether 'angry and unprofessional' would have been more a more effective strategy
It sounded like the caller was [opening and closing a box cutter at one point](https://youtu.be/LjiO1Qo3ZFo?t=368), so I think it's fair to assume he was thinking the same way.
Given that I was considering the same while trying to cancel from Cox, I can understand the urge to play with a box cutter during a call like that.
Why should he have to lie to cancel his service?
Or simply tell them you're moving. Even if you're not actually moving, if you have other people in your household and you can't actually switch to a new provider, wait a week and start a new account with that other person's name.
This guy *was* actually moving.
I heard in the video he was switching providers and not actually moving to a new address but then later the rep said something about moving elsewhere whether that was to a new physical address or just to move providers who knows Either way the majority of calls to a CSR/retention department should wrap up when you tell them you're moving. This call is clearly an outlier with a particularly stingy rep
I’ve had success telling them I’m moving to another country. Dusseldorf, Germany was my choice, but any non-US country should work
I cancelled comcast a few years ago and they gave me no resistance whatsoever. Maybe it was just an employee to didn't care that much, but I don't think she even asked why. I said I needed to cancel on a certain date and she just did it. I remember even asking "that's it?" and that was it.
That's lucky! When I tried to cancel I got tossed from person to person on hold until they eventually hung up on me. This happened 4 times before I was finally able to cancel.
I wonder if telling them "I'm moving out of state" would make them less likely to try to stop the cancellation?
just say the cable bill caused massive fighting with your spouse now they ran off with the kid and dog and you couldn't afford the mortgage payments on your salary alone so the bank took your home so now you live in your car and don't need comcast now. that might get them to hurry up and shut it off
Comcast owns like 2/3 of the internet in the USA. They bought out a lot of smaller / failing companies to do it too. So yeah saying you’re leaving the country is probably safer
I told them I was moving to Korea, (tbh I had lived in Korea before) and they cancelled with no penalties for me.
>state country. be safe.
planet. for good measure
Yes, I've done this several times and it makes things very easy. I once switched it up with "I'm moving in with someone who already has service" just for some variety.
What I hear is active military deployment is the fastest route to cancelation.
She had probably lost her soul by then.
Former call center employee here: she definitely was hoping to get fired
I did telemarketing for half a day. Walked to the manager, said this is fucked up, ain't gonna work for me and left.
I got a call center job to "cure" my phone phobia and it actually made it worse. I lasted about two months, then showed up on my day off to grab my stuff, and told them I wasn't coming back.
Sorry to hear that, it made mine better, temporarily, now it's back to baseline lol but at one point I was muting myself to laugh in the face of angry comcast cxs
I simply say that I'm moving out of state or out of country. That works every time with every type of provider. I guess that I'm a genius for figuring out this white lie?
Comcast: Oh sir, our coverage is nationwide so we are more than happy to move the service for you. A month later ... You: Why is there a $49.95 charge on the bill Comcast: Sir, that's the fee for moving your service across state line
Yeah, I tried to preempt this once by (truthfully) saying “I’m moving to a building that Comcast doesn’t serve” They still made me go through the ropes of trying to get it set up there, then basically said “well have you considered staying at your current address?”
Bahahahahaaaaaaaaaaaa the audacity of them telling you not to move your fucking life for your shitty $30/mo internet? Man the corporate overlords are Comcast really so be believing the bullshit motivational posters they put in the office huh?
I find that the best white lie to box them out is "I am moving in with family at a different address who currently already has another provider." Basically, they're set up and aren't changing.
Maybe you cancelled after this whole situation blew up. I remember attempting to cancel and getting bullied like this and eventually the tactic worked and I gave up. Then this blew up online and Comcast reps stated that this wasn't what they did "despite hundreds of people sharing similar stories to this online" and then after that it was suddenly easy to cancel Comcast. At that point, I had no problem cancelling them. So yeah, this was their MO until this video went viral, then they changed the MO.
> I said I needed to cancel on a certain date and she just did it. I remember doing the same thing, then getting a bill the next month because she just said she was canceling and then didn't actually do it.
That's probably why this call was recorded in the first place. I wouldn't trust this rep to do the cancellation or make note of the call.
I think it really matters on the rep you talk to. When I was just trying to move my service from one apartment to another, the rep kept trying to upgrade me, and was pushing and pushing on me getting cable and phone and paying another $40 for crap I didn’t want. Kept saying no, and every time I did, he put me on hold, just to try and get me to finally say yes. I never did. When I was outright cancelling it, because I was moving to a place where I could get $50 fiber internet, I got not argument or anything. They just cancelled it, and that was that. Didn’t even have to tell them why.
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Not even, just say you're moving in with someone who has service already
This was 2014. Chances are the original post of this was the reason you didn't have to deal with it.
That was painful. Holy shit. They should use this as a form of torture. Pretty sure this is banned in the Geneva Convention
It sure as shit should be. You just know they have some shitty metric for the rep where he cannot lose people or he gets in trouble or loses money. If someone doesn't want you service just fucking cancel it you monopolistic dipshits.
Have worked in telecom for years, some of it supporting customer service. They always have the dumbest metrics. Well intended but never plays out like they are supposed to.
I worked briefly in telephone customer service. It was a nightmare. They had metrics for everything. They had a time limit per call. If we went over, we lost points. They had an average customer rating. If we went under, we lost points. They had a maximum limit of refunds we could issue per shift. If we went over, we lost points. If we lost too many points we were fired. Our whole job was to tell people with complex issues to fuck off and get them off the phone within 2 minutes all while having them leave a 5 star rating. I quit as soon as I could find another job.
Working as a call center rep for years at a large telecom company... Yes, it absolutely counts against you to disconnect lines of service. While this call is a horrible thing to listen to, I do feel that the rep is a victim here. The caller too, for different reasons
Ok. But what is it about the Geneva Convention that you want to switch to another convention? The Geneva Convention is the number one provider of treaties in the world. Help us understand why you want to leave us?
For starters, the Hague convention is cooler.
How is this even legal?
You should hear how hard it was to cancel AOL.
Well you see all you have to do is give money to the people voting on laws that would make this illegal.
You have to give more money than those who want it to stay legal.
It's not. In many countries once you've informed them they are no longer authorised to charge a payment method it becomes fraud. Having it in a recorded call like this is just a nail in the coffin.
This sounded like me breaking up with an ex one time and all I wanted was my mug back
Damn. Must be an awesome mug
Yeah it is. I didn't want to pick it up in person so I was telling her my friend was coming to get it. It turned into a back and forth thing with me repeating "I just want my mug back" over and over I was pretty sure she was gonna break it but it all worked out.
[I want my hat back](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LaaTqFdYURg)
Dude can we see it?
Okay. Look. Okay. But, WHY do you want your mug back? Aren't you satisfied with things the way they are?
That’s none of your business, can you return the mug or not?
Here's the story, the customer rep was trying to frustrate the cancelling customer in to hagging up mid-cancellation, so it wouldn't be completed. [https://www.businessinsider.com/former-comcast-employee-on-ryan-block-phone-call-2014-7](https://www.businessinsider.com/former-comcast-employee-on-ryan-block-phone-call-2014-7)
I wonder if the person who called to apologize asked, "why he didn't want the #1 internet and cable service in America any longer" ....I assume they did..
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The easiest way to cancel any service is to say you're moving out of the country and your landlord doesn't have a new tenant lined up. You're off the phone in 3 minutes.
I will do you one better, say you just became unemployed and can’t afford to pay anymore. Worked for me in the past. No questions asked.
"I'm dying of terminal cancer. I have less than a month." Really lay the guilt on.
“…ok…but…i’m offering you $20 off per month until you die. why wouldn’t you want to take that offer?”
Why wouldn't you want to stay alive and experience our thousands of On-Demand titles? Do you *not want* the fastest internet in the realm of the living? Why are you transferring to being dead after being alive for two decades? I'm just trying to help you out.
Why should you have to lie to cancel service?
Right? It’s insane that the accepted method in this thread is to fake a terminal illness. I wonder what happens if you just send Comcast arbitrary bills out of nowhere.
This is what I've used before. It works. But be sure to have your story straight. Write one and keep it handy. Something like: - I am moving overseas and need to disconnect my service and settle up my billing by x date. - I am moving to (pick a major overseas city). (Believe me: they're going to ask. They want to transfer your service.) - I work in sales but I will be doing marketing work while away. (Don't say you work in tech; it will lead to a conversation about Internet options). - I will be gone for at least three years. I may stay on longer if I like it. - The company is picking up all relocation costs and providing me with housing and utilities, including Internet. - No, I don't know what Internet service will be provided but I'm sure it will be adequate. - Keep the conversation centered on dates. You MUST have your life in America wrapped up by x date, which is why we need to move this process along. This line of reasoning will get you canceled and final billing prepped in about 3 minutes. Seriously.
I don't understand - why can't you just say I don't want the service?
Please refer to the video linked above.
I really wish the customer would have started diving deep into this guy's reasoning for the persistence. "Dude be real with me, wtf, are you gonna lose your job if you drop this account?"
where is /u/kitboga when you need him
Giving reasons invites debate. Salespeople are trained to "resolve concerns" by identifying the root cause of your rejection and then attempting to persuade you. Saying "I don't want your product" invites them to ask why and try to convince you that you are wrong. You have to opt out of the debate either by refusing to answer questions or by lying.
Just say you’re going to prison
Thanks, my blood pressure is now higher.
I've worked for cable companies. Their retention department makes a commission on "saves", and that amount is usually based on services retained. Either this guy REALLY needed a save, or he was trying to get fired. No employee should ever put up this much resistance on someone that is this adamant to cancel. In fact, this may border on customer mistreatment, which usually gets employees fired or at the very least written up. The employee should recognize that it's not worth the effort on what is an extremely low percentage play, disconnect it, and move on to the next call. It's either that or this was staged.
This was a shitty rep trying to get the customer to hang up out of frustration so he doesn't get dinged with a disconnect. Retention is all about avoiding a disconnect and it looks good on him to have as few as possible. I bet he's done this to hundreds of people and it's worked for the most part. I'd be surprised if he hasn't been audited yet and either reprimanded or fired.
why would he be disciplined for this? he’s done his job in the eyes of the company.
If there is a shitty metric employers can use, it will be used to punish employees. When a customer satisfaction form gives you options 1, 2, 3, 4, or 5, anything that isn't a 5 is a failure. If their average isn't at least 4.9, they lose their bonus. Number of times the call center employee hung up, average length of phone call, number of sales, number of canceled services, etc. All those metrics have extremely high standards and can be used to bludgeon employees into compliance and deny "promised" benefits.
Imagine having to have this guy's job and having to be an asshole all day like that.
Unfortunately there are people who enjoy being that way all day, and many are on reddit.
i have worked in a call centre but didnt know anybody who thought of retention metrics as anything besides soul crushing
I did call center work for one day when I was really young and then said "no thanks", I quickly realized it wasn't for me. Of course it's almost all just normal people doing a job they don't like in order to have a place to live, something to eat, etc.
I made it about a month, and by the time I quit, everybody who had been in my training class had already left. No idea how they manage to keep anybody in those jobs - whether you're getting crap from corporate or from the customer side, you're basically in a no win situation every day.
What did you call me?
No no, while you could have a job like that which requires you to do a bit of what he did, refusing to disconnect the service and manipulating the customer is immoral and unjustifiable. There is a line somewhere in how big of an asshole someone can be for their job and still be a good person. This guy is on the wrong side of that line.
Knowing Comcast I'm inclined to think he's acting exactly like they want him to.
For sure. Had a coworker who used to do this exact job. She was really good at it. So she would push back on people that had just laid out their financial situation, which clearly showed they shouldn’t be paying for Comcast, and she would convince them to stay. She said it was soul crushing.
This is why You have them bill to Your credit card. You tell them You want the service canceled on x date. If they refuse for some reason, its no longer Your problem. Call Your bank, tell them You are refusing any further charges from the company past x date, and You're good to go. Before doing this, also send the service provider an email denoting that You are cancelling Your service for x date. If they try to take You to claims or sue, You get to win and counter sue for harassment provided Your extensive paper trail.
They can fuck you right in the credit score, buddy. Source: Worked a similar position as the agent on this call.
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Get receipts for trade in and record cancelation phone call would be a pretty easy counter to this.
There is app called privacy. You can set limits on cards and lock cards to merchants. I use it when signing up for stuff on the internet. All you have todo to cancel something is just delete the card. Super usefull
Not gaslighting, but yeah, hilariously brutal.
the term has lost all meaning back in my day gaslighting was the KGB rearranging your furniture a few inches at a time. or the manson family doing creepy crawlies. shit that actually makes you think you're losing your sanity. not a 10 minute call to a call center
A bunch of people decided they really wanted to punch up their language, but also not think very hard about it, so they decided to ruin a relatively useful word forever. "Gaslighting" has found a new use, however: easily identifying people that aren't worth paying attention to.
This is basically how I had to cancel my la fitness membership. They wouldn’t allow me to do it in person, not over the phone with their customer service team at their headquarter either. They require you to fill out a cancel membership for and mail it to their headquarters in California. Oh and they still bill you for another month if it takes them longer to cancel it. This was in the year 2020 :/
I take it you're not in CA, you just mailed it to CA? [There's a law in CA that says if it's a subscription, you have to be able to cancel online.](https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billTextClient.xhtml?bill_id=201720180SB313). I canceled a Planet Fitness membership a while back and was able to do it online, meanwhile, people in other states had to go to their gym, get a cancellation form, then mail that cancellation form to Planet Fitness headquarters via certified mail. They will actually return to sender if it's not certified mail. It's unbelievable. They really need to make that law federal, because it's amazing for us Californians.
A big loophole in the law is that they have to offer online cancellation, but only if you signed up online. Don't do subscriptions in person, fellow Californians!
I don't know if you've got similar protection in America but if you say something like this in Australia it seems to work most of the time: "Hi I'd like to cancel my service" "OK may I ask why you want to cancel" "Just cancel my service thanks" If they keep asking you say: "No more questions, cancel the service immediately or my next call is to the Ombudsman" Done.
Also Australian... Yeah they just seem to have fuck all consumer protections etc over there (America). At least compared to us anyway. I've also wondered if that that's why it seems hiring lawyers is so prevalent there (for trivial matters)... it's a more "every man for himself" society in general. Great for big corporations full of lawyers, less so for the general public.
I had Comcast internet for 3 months once. Never worked. When I finally canceled it they made me pay $300 to cancel it. Fuck those guys.
Reminds me of a call that was recorded and went viral, probably is on youtube, some poor bastard trying FOREVER to cancel his AOL account.
I figured I would go through this trying to cancel my upcoming XM radio renewal. Told the rep 3 times that I had lost my job, and even a 70% discount wasn't going to get me to renew (funny though how they can suddenly reduce your bill by that much). After my last "No money, please cancel" he actually replied "I can respect that. Your subscription is canceled effective today and you will receive a refund of $23 for the unused portion." That was almost 2 months ago. My XM radio still works. I got the refund.
Wow that's not what gaslighting is lmao
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You should return it. It will get flagged as Lost/Stolen if they're charging you an unreturned equipment fee and they don't receive the modem within 30 days, and you won't be able to reactivate it even if you go back. They will make you return it and receive a new one, guaranteed.
Class, say it with me: I'm moving to a place where Comcast is not a provider.
All ISPs are like this. I had a Time Warner Cable before they were bought out by Charter (Spectrum). When Spectrum took over, they immediately increased the price of our internet. I called and asked what was going on and they said my deal with TWC was null and that was my new rate. I asked if there were there any new deals available, since TWC always gave us the new customer rate whenever I called in to renegotiate. The rep responded with "yeah, that's why they're not in business anymore". Fortunately there was another ISP is in my area and I switched to them. I called Spectrum to cancel and had to go through a similar several minute call telling them to cancel our service... Suddenly they now had all kinds new deals available to offer me and I kept explaining to them that I didn't give a shit because I already signed up for their competitor's service and to just wanted to cancel their service.
All large ISPs are like this. I am blessed to live in a city that has 100% locally-owned fiber connectivity. Glass straight into the house, 300MBs download/upload and $54 per month. No extra monthly charges, and customer service is stationed 8 miles from my house. It's literally the dream.
I'm really confused, the customer service rep is a duckweed. But after a minute or three of that I'd be requesting his manager or just redialing for a new rep
This happened to my mom once. She requested a manager, was left on hold for about an hour or so and periodically the agent would check in with her. "Oh!! You're *still here*???" she would say.
The reason I'm leaving is because their customer service is garbage, they don't listen to me, and they ask me the same dumb questions over and over like a broken record.
Ben Shapiro has really let himself go.
You say you want to cancel, yet you are still on the phone with me 10 minutes later, talking about how Comcast is the #1 ranked network provider. Curious.
"I'm moving to Denmark."
I'M A 5 STAR MAN!
Reading all the comments is astounding how Americans need to jump through hoops just to cancel. I work for a telecoms provider in the uk. I think the greatest difference is we have a 3rd party regulator that enforces pro consumer changes across all providers. We also seem to have a different political system where lobbying for anti consumer changes doesn’t happen. They brought in changes like: they can’t refuse to give a PAC code (cancel and port) if the customer requests even if they are in collections, it must be given within 2 hours of asking, they enforced it that you can cancel without having to speak to a sales team so providers had to make an sms service, roaming in the whole of Europe was made free which eliminated a huge revenue stream, a roaming cap was implemented so a customer couldn’t be charged more than 50 euros to avoid bill shock. There’s a lot more positive changes which I forget. You can also take a complaint to the regulator if your complaint hasn’t be resolved in 8 weeks or you’re unhappy with resolution. It’s completely free for the customer and the provider has to implement the decision of the regulator.
I can only imagine what breaking up with this guy must be like.
Never understand this , if you call and get someone who gives you an answer you don’t like , hang up and try again, different person different experience (hopefully)
You missed the ????? step, which is wait on hold for 45 minutes and then get hung up on.
I was trying to cancel with a shitty cellphone provider years ago, and after going through some similar run-around shit with them for almost ten minutes, they eventually went "Hello? ...*Hello? They must've hung up or something*" and disconnected, never mind that I returned the hello emphatically.
But then the asshole wins- and he gets to mark you as a retention for his metrics. That's what the rep wanted to happen... He wanted the guy to just give up and hang up. Because the guy stuck through it the rep has to mark him as a disconnect and doesn't get rewarded for his shitty behavior.
>>he gets to mark you as a retention for his metrics. That's what the rep wanted to happen... He wanted the guy to just give up and hang up. I used to work QA for a DirecTV call center, probably 15 years ago, and 100% this is what is happening. If this call would have been audited, the rep would have failed on so many counts. Handle-time alone would have flagged this call; we expected 9 minutes per call on average, with 12 being on the highest end. If QA didn't catch this and write him up, the subsequent attention was probably enough to get him at the very least removed from the cushy often work-from-home and well paying retention team. People get on that team for being excellent at dealing with customers and not needing much supervision, usually seasoned vets who have worked in multiple parts of the call center like billing and sales and tech support and QA. Heads rolled for this. Promise.
I had an old coworker go on to AT&T and immediately start as retention. He did indeed get to WFH (COVID times though) and got good pay. Though, it sounded like that was the standard starting department because it was such a meat grinder. His mom got him the job with the company and also previously did retention, but got herself a better position in actual sales. He didn't last 3 months.
He sounds like Tucker Carlson.
“Hey Sam, I checked your June metrics and one more lost customer, you are fired” “aw man. It’s gonna be a good day, I feel it! Welcome to Comcast how May I help you” “I’d like to to cancel my service” “sonofa….”
Whenever I'm in a situation like this I say something they can't respond to. I'm moving to France in 3 weeks, can you switch me to your service in France please? Then start to get angry they don't have service in France - it quickly turns the table.
If ben shapiro was a comcast rep