Tuesday, January 6, 2009

XM Radio customer DIS-service




Well, tonight is "Night Two" of trying to disconnect one of my four XM Radios. The radio died, and now it has been a LOOOOONNNNNNGGGGG time on hold with the customer service reprentatives (yes, plural) to just have one radio turned off.

You can do just about anything on the XM Radio website... except disconnect a radio. No doubt this is just a technological "road block" to try and discourage unhappy customers from being able to cancel their service on a whim ( reminiscent of the now defunct AOL ).

You get through to the first international operator (obviously India) after a hold of about 5 minutes. After an aggravating confirmation of everything but your firstborn, and a pitch for upgrading to Sirius services ("No, Howard Stern is too filthy for me, thank you"), you finally get around to telling them your business of wanting to disconnect just one radio. Well... that's handled by ANOTHER operator in ANOTHER department. When I queried why they must use TWO people to do this, it was because "we're too busy to handle that". What???

And guess, what? I've been able to compose this entire blog post while on hold AGAIN for now ten twenty minutes to get to the "cancellation operator". "We are currently experiencing high call volumes due to Sirius packages... blah, blah, blah" I thought this was the line for cancellations...??!! there is only one reason I'm on a this long a hold wait: you have too few operators to handle this particular task, and you are just making it hard to discontinue a radio due to FEAR!!!

I also have to suffer through Oprah's best friend begging me in a recorded message not to hang up... also a Nascar driver pitching his show and also asking me "this is worth the wait"... NOT!

I want my life back!

Just aggravation, pure and simple. They could easily add a radio button for disconnecting a particular radio (without "canceling" the total subscription). This is just customer harassment and roadblocking, pure and simple.

I love my XM Radio, but the customer service for this particular requirement is a DIS-service. XM... FIX IT!

/Doc