Today I had one of the top 5 worst customer service experiences I’ve ever had with any company (Vonage). I had a good experience with them up until this experience which makes this even more unfortunate. One of the most customer unfriendly practices of many new businesses is to make signing up for services extremely easy but canceling extremely difficult. Vonage is definitely in this group.
Signing up for the service is extremely easy. You can get a kit at almost any electronics store, or sign up online, or get referred from a friend, and probably many other ways. The unknown downside of their practice is that they make it extremely difficult to cancel the service. The tactics they are using are reminicent of the way AOL used to work. I was finally able to cancel but it took two separate calls wasting over 1 1/2 hours of my time (most of it on hold). Both people I spoke with were extremely unhelpful and rude and tried extremely hard to give me the hard sell of why I should stick with the service all at the same time while giving me a poor experience making me want to cancel even more.
Another issue I found with Vonage is that they want to be treated and be equal to typical utility phone companies. However, they don’t want to do business in the same way. Their hours to call and cancel the service are extremely inconveninent for anyone on the west coast so that they basically have to call during a normal work day. They are only open mon-fri. I wasn’t able to find a time to call during work and they were closed on the weekend. Due to this fact I was unable to cancel before my billing cycle renewed. Based on this I was forced to pay for 29 days of phone service I didn’t and cannot use. If I were dealing with any typical utility phone company such as Quest they would be forced to give me a prorated refund for the service I didn’t receive because they are a public utility. If Vonage and other similar companies want to be on the same playing field as a utility and compete with them they should play by the same rules.
These types of tactics are completely opposite of what companies should be doing in a competitive market place. The only reason I can see businesses using these type of business practices is that they don’t have faith in their own products enough to let them stand on their own. If you have a decent product you should have faith that customers will stick with it. So the point is for businesses to be successful in a fast moving and ever-changing market place they need to make the customers ability to make their own decisions easy. If it is easy to sign up it should be equally as easy to cancel.
Treat your customers well and make a quality product. If you do this the chances of success are much higher than if you treat them as if they are a commodity.