Well the other day I decided to give subscription music a shot again, I previously had tried urge.com and although I thought the service was fairly usable I really was not impressed with the music collection.
The other day I figured I would give Rhapsody a chance, I was really hesitant since Real has a bad reputation, there are lots of reasons for this but one of the biggest being their inclusion of spyware.
Well of late they made some changes and their software is now suposidly less viral so I figured I would give them a shot again, the good news is that the software no longer appeared to carry its weight in crap-ware, the bad news is that they are still fairly evil.
After just an hour trying to use their service I was decidedly un-impressed, it was just awkward and non-intuitive; with that decision under my belt I went to the accounts details page to cancel my account and found I could not, at least not online I had to call a 800 number to cancel.
Well I tried several times over the last week with hold times exceeding 15m, my time having a high premium meant I could not wait long enough to get a hold of them, that is until this weekend where I managed to get through.
The woman on the other end of the line was Indian, I suspect I was transferred to a off-shore call center; she was polite but a bit clumsy with her english.
In theory this should be a pretty simple transaction, here is my account number please cancel my account; unfortunately that not the way it went.
Immediately upon receiving the request to cancel my account the woman starts asking me how much of the service I used and why I want to cancel; appreciating this could just be a means to improve the quality of their offering I give my honest opinions of the service, the woman however goes on with a pushy sleazy sales pitch reminiscent of the tactics health clubs and timeshares use.
I politely let her know I am not interested in keeping my account for any reason, yet she continues so I interrupt her and tell he to "just please cancel my account, I appreciate this is your job but I am not keeping the account", she now starts to try to convince me to call back on the day the 14 day trial will expire, I again remind her I am not going to keep the account and to cancel my account immediately.
She finally cancels the account but tells me she has done me a favor and left another account silently opened for me, I tell her to cancel that one as well, she goes on to tell me how there is no re-occurring cost to leaving it open and I respond by telling her I don't want any of my billing information left on file, she finally with a bit more coercion "disables" this account but tells me I must go to the website to remove my billing information.
Well right after I get off the call I go to their website to remove my billing information and the site fails, I try repeatedly with Firefox and IE and the same result.
The net of all this for me is that Real still is a sleazy company, they have gone out of their way to make it hard to cancel your account by not allowing this to be done on the website, they have trained their staff to make canceling accounts as difficult as possible I nearly had to threaten to get them to do it.
I have to say I highly recommend against using any of the real services based on this experience.
[update 09/10/07 9:00AM] Well after the above experience I tried using the online support form as a means to get the billing details removed from the account, at every turn their pages tried to stear me back to the phone but I did find one option that allowed be to submit a free-form request so I did so, the request was simple "please remove my billing details from my account, the website is not allowing me to do so".
Well this morning I heard back, the response? I was told that I should not be concerned that my billing details are still there as they won't charge me anything unless I perform a transaction with them, but if I really wanted to get them removed I would have to call the same 800 number I did previosly to ask for them to remove my billing details.
I also tried going back to the website to see if I could try to remove my billing details again, this time the delete buttons were missing; no way for me to even try to do it.
I responded in email that this was un-acceptable, maybe they will do the right thing and I wont have to call back and get the sleazy sales pitch.