Canceling Sirius – Long time readers know that I signed up for Sirius/XM Internet (only) streaming about a year ago to add it to the database. One of my concerns was that Sirius could end up playing the AOL game. Back in the heyday of the dialup internet business, AOL (and Earthlink and others) used a similar strategy to avoid people canceling their accounts – make it impossible. They set it up so that the only way to cancel was to call an 800 number and then not put any staff to answer the phone. This ultimately resulted in a group of state Attorneys General filing suit against AOL and forcing them into a consent decree to stop its abusive practices.
So today, I called to cancel my Sirius Internet account, partly as a test to see what happens. Some politicians have been making noise lately about Sirius and their recurring billing. Once you give a company permission to bill your credit card, they will continue to bill it long after you are no longer alive unless someone forces them to stop.
So it’s Monday around 11 AM (Eastern)…. It’s moderately hard to find out that you have to call the 800 number to cancel an account. [888-539-7474]. You’re greeted with the all too common voice response unit. Despite the fact I’m calling from my land line, and it matches the phone number on the account, it asks me to enter the phone number for my account. [toll-free numbers automatically get your phone number in real time via ANI because they are paying for the call]. It then offers me choices, including “Billing” and “Cancel Service”. So I figure Billing gets answered and Cancel your account will be “when we get around to it”.. [One of the old Internet Service tricks was to select Open New Account, and when they immediately answered the phone, put them on the spot to cancel the existing account]… I choose Cancel to test the system – so the hold time was about 10 minutes. An American sounding young woman answered, wanted my account #, confirmed my address and email address and did magic and announced my account is closed. She asked why I was closing my account and I offered the reason “I just don’t use it enough to justify keeping it” (which is true). She didn’t push back – no counteroffer like giving me a reduced price or a month free.
So we’ll see if it actually is canceled…
One of the main reasons I’m not more enthusiastic about Sirius Streaming is it is tenacious about forcing you to login over and over using a 4 character randomly generated code – this is probably because of a problem with account “sharing” – where a family or group of people try to get one account, and then all use the same login to listen. This aggressiveness to shut this down also creates issues for people like me who have an iPhone and a PC…. If you listen on the iPhone, it then locks you out of the Web based account, and refers you to the 800 number to fix your “problem”…. the time interval before you switch back to the other device is in hours or maybe even days. That was a Sirius obstacle to using the account for testing the streams.
