Saturday, March 24, 2007

Making it Easy to Leave

I just called Bank of America about a credit card I have with them regarding a question on my account. It was, of course, an adventure in a nest of voice menus... but here's what was kind of interesting.

I went through all of them, being one of the good sheeple they anticipate. I was many menus in before I was actually offered the option of talking to a person. No surprise.

But by the time I got there, I'd been offered the option of closing my account three times. And the recording while I was waiting for a person (before I just gave up) informed me that I could press 4 to cancel my account several more times.

Why would you design a customer service system to encourage people to stop being a customer that way? Why would you make it easier to leave than to get help?

By the time I gave up and hung up because the wait was so long, I was thinking that maybe Bank of America had a good idea with that...

1 comment:

Unknown said...

Just wanted to share my recent go-round with GoDaddy. I had some URLs up for automated renewal with them, and, because I didn't check my old e-mail address, missed the final notice about auto-renewal.

I'd snapped up the URLs last year while on a client call. (I was the only one online during the meeting.) At the time, it seemed like a good idea, but they rapidly decided they weren't interested.

There customer service was pretty good about letting me know how to get out of the auto renewal, but when you go in and hit what you thnk is the final Cancel button, another set of choices pops up, and the radio button that's "lit" is Don't Cancel. Grrrrrr.