How easy is it to cancel your answering service account with us? It’s pretty easy!
I had to cancel service with AT&T recently. It was not the best experience I’ve had this week, and since I’m always looking for interesting things to post about our answering service here, I thought I’d make a comparison.
Although AT&T attempts to push as many customer service issues through an automated system (their website, or their interactive voice response phone system) as possible while you’re a customer, they won’t let you cancel through their website. I had saved my web login URL, username, and password dutifully many years ago when I set up this particular account. I was able to log in, but searched everywhere for how to cancel to no avail. They make you call. After going through a voicemail tree, I waited on hold a while to speak to a person. She was very nice, but wanted an answer to a weird security question (“Name your childhood hero”), which I just couldn’t remember. Alternate steps for verification ensued, which were eventually successful. I answered questions about why I was cancelling, and listened patiently about how valuable my business was to AT&T. Again, the lady was very nice, but the whole thing took forever and the idea that AT&T is truly going to “miss” my business seemed a bit — I don’t know if disingenuous is the right word — maybe, flat.
The timer on my phone said I’d been on the phone for about 30 mins. This, of course, does not count the first 15 mins I spent looking through their rather convoluted website. So, all told, about 45 mins to cancel.
If you are a client of ours and you wish to cancel, you can just call us or send us an e-mail. It really is that simple.
Will we call or e-mail back to see if we can entice you to keep us? Yes. We don’t want to lose any clients. We’re not a huge answering service, and every client truly is important to us. But you don’t have to respond, your account is still cancelled and we won’t bother you if you just want to move on. And, if we do have the pleasure of speaking with you, I promise you won’t get the feeling we are reading a script about “how important your business is to us.” It IS important to us. We will pay attention to you. We want to hear if something went wrong so that we can learn and fix it for our other clients.
In all the things that we do, we try to deal with our clients the way we would like to be treated in a similar situation. This is how we provide excellent customer service, and I think it shines through even when you are leaving us.