I got an Xbox 360 about a year ago with the hope of using it as a media player for my HP Media Vault because it is supposed to be a DLNA-compliant media server. It’s not. You can get it to work by installing Twonkyvision’s server on the Media Vault (which costs another $40), but it won’t stream Divx/xvid-encoded videos, which pretty much renders it useless as a media player in my opinion.
I’m not much of a gamer myself, and so the Xbox 360 hasn’t gotten much use. For some reason that I cannot recall, I decided to upgrade my Xbox 360 silver membership (which is free) to an Xbox Live Gold membership which costs about $7.99/month. I figured I could always just switch back to the free membership if I didn’t use the Gold membership features. After a while of seeing that monthly charge appear on the credit card, I decided to cancel it. I first tried canceling it on-line via the webpage for Live, then through the Xbox console, and wasted at least a half hour before searching on the Internet only to find out that that only way to cancel it is to call up 1-800-4MY-XBOX (1-800-469-9269) to wait to talk to an operator. And that took an additional 18 minutes, most of which time I was on hold.
I really hate it when a company makes such an obvious attempt to hang on to subscription fees that it causes that level of inconvenience when attempting to cancel a service. Signing up took a few minutes and I didn’t need to call anyone, but canceling took 48 minutes from my life. So I’ll post this here for three reasons:
I hope someone Diggs this and maybe it will get the attention of the person Microsoft who can correct the situation. If they do, I’ll gladly remove this from my blog.
dugg.
http://digg.com/xbox_360/Microsoft_makes_it_too_hard_to_cancel_Xbox_gold_membership
chris
that is a really stupid complaint. make the people who were gonna cancel their account anyway happy by making it easier to cancel. the(any) company could care less what someone who is gonna cancel thinks about the cancellation process. you even said yourself you waited a few months before you decided to cancel. if everyone does that then the company makes a lot of money because people(you) are lazy.
It will certainly make me think twice before signing up for a paid account again. There are plenty of reasons that it should be easy to cancel an account, for example, if I’m traveling unable to use it for a few months but intend to sign up again when I things change. But if it takes a lot of time and effort, I’m going to pay for something I’m not using. That may seem clever on the part of the company causing this inconvenience, but it bothers me, the customer.
My complaint has to do with the asymmetry of the process, i.e., signing up takes about 2 minutes, canceling takes 18 minutes, not including the time to figure out how to do it. There’s no way to justify that. Companies think that this goes unnoticed but it doesn’t. AOL took it on the chin when some guy recorded the lengths they went through to prevent him from canceling a subscription and Microsoft is doing something that is similar, although not quite as blatant.