There is zero incentive for a company to invest in tooling and tech to make processes that lose them customers more efficient. This is something that has to be regulated and enforced. I just don't see a c-suit clamoring to spend money on making it easier to leave.
There is a reason to invest in this, the rationale goes as follows: Some of my customers will legitimately need to cancel, unsubscribe, stop using, or whatever, but they like the product. If I piss these customers off, they may recommend against using it, and refuse to ever use it again so I should accept that they're leaving with grace and maybe they'll return later. You can offer to "pause" a subscription for example, "Posted to Amundsen-Scott† for six months? Alas Swim Fun Inc don't have a pool there, but when you get back just hit resume and you can keep the same pricing, meanwhile we won't charge you".
But far too many "business leaders" are focused on short term gains at any cost and so this doesn't compute for them. They don't care that you currently like the product and would resubscribe when you get back from the pole, because that's a year or more away, they care about next quarter, and if you aren't income next quarter you're irrelevant to them, fuck you.
† Amundsen-Scott is the name of the base at the South Pole of the planet. It's a cool place. But lots of services aren't available there or would make no sense. You can't live there permanently, so those people are coming back.
I was pretty sure we'd abandoned the "but it would hurt the business and they'd change their ways" fantasy years ago, because a) it doesn't, and be) they don't. How's Equifax doing these days? Oh yeah, totally fine.
In my case I enjoy reading The Economist and do not mind paying for it, but some years back I had to cancel my subscription (I was cutting back on expenses) and honestly I found that experience so much against the business values they preach that it has made me not subscribe again, even if it means not reading their publication.
(Every few years I go to check if they have made it easier to unsubscribe, but last time I checked they still had the same practices)
Edit: I can also imagine that I’m a minority and so it really pays off to keep doing this.
I avoid subscription services like the plague because of this (and other reasons).
I can't know if they're going to do this kind of crap until it is to late. Even if some one reviewed services for this they could change at any time for the worse. So I just assume it will happen and try to limit getting into that bad arrangement as much as possible.
I have a good example of this dynamic using Comcast: when we left New Haven, I had to spend a couple hours in line at a dingy, poorly staffed office terminating my account (the dude working there was fine, he needed coworkers) and then a couple months of “accidentally” still billing me. They could afford to be sloppy on billing and cancellation where I’d lived because in 2008 the competition was (I am not making this up) 128kpbs ISDN and 768-1Mbps DSL since the phone company had badly neglected its wiring.
In addition to being illegal, this was short sighted because they’re a national company. Comcast/Xfinity is one of three gigabit choices in my neighborhood and they periodically send offers with competitive pricing but each time I remember what dealing with them was like and toss it into the shredder. I’m sure the regional office would say they’re better run than the New England one, or that they have a better system, but I’m not going to find out, and there’s no way they skimped enough to save more than they could have made with over a decade of service in a new region.
Perfect person to ask this. What is behind the need to constantly abandon products/services in favor of new offerings that have a fraction of the functionality?
Because Google earns more money by making those engineers optimize ads rather than maintaining systems with a fraction of the ROI.
The upper leaders even talked about that. How Google was looking for "the next big thing", and every time it turned out to just be be more ads since nothing else they tried even came close to being as profitable.
Its small and deliberate. Setting the mental state of the customer to obfuscate the responsible party by throwing in Salesforce. A deliberate dark pattern.
Their in lies the power of the internet. It exposes who and what wants to control the narrative. This is what needs to be quelled. The need and want for control is toxic and needs to end.
Claiming misogyny at every turn shuts down discourse and actually hurts progress as people will just avoid all discussion even when it is legitimately misogyny.
Avoiding discussion just because misogyny is mentioned when misogyny is, in fact, at every turn is what actually hurts progress, as is avoiding mentioning misogyny because of people doing that. (But, of course, that's the motivation for the avoidance in the first place.)
Interested to know this as well. I am not sure if pointing to a definition on Urban Dictionary with ~100 thumbs is enough to redefine a word let alone assume that the average person is using it as a dog whistle.
