After reading my posts about people who have had to beg to be disconnected from AOL, J2, and Sky TV, Vodka offers the following advice:
I've worked for a telecommunications company that I would prefer to go
unnamed, and I'd like to offer some tips to anyone trying to
disconnect a service they no longer want. The biggest tip is to call
well outside of normal business hours — in my company, customer service
was open 24/7, but the retention department closed in the evening. If
you call, say, before bed, or during the middle of the night, you'll
just be talking to a regular CS rep who has no incentive whatsoever to
keep you as a customer. It can turn a twenty minute phone call into a
two minute phone call.Second, if you get a rude rep, hang up and
call right back. Some reps, especially in commission driven
departments like sales and retention, are especially pushy, where as
if you call back you might get someone who is right at the end of his
shift and just wants to get you off of his phone.Third, there is one
reason for disconnection that will work for almost every
service–moving. Tell them you're moving out of the service area, or
moving in with someone who already has the same service, and they
should be required to cancel everything for you.Also, it would be helpful to remember that the representatives in
retention are paid to retain you as customers–threatening to record
the call, asking for their name or ID, or asking for a supervisor will
not do anything. All calls are recorded and the representatives have
responses they are required to give for every customer question or
complaint. The rep who actually gets in trouble will be the one who
disconnects you immediately without trying to retain you, not the one
who spends twenty minutes using every tactic in the book the company
wrote for him.
