> Customer choice and experience should almost always trump “increased costs”.
No it shouldn't and that should be obvious.
> Plus, this ignores practically the entirety of the rest of their comment, where they explain that the extreme openness just means that companies make it absurdly easy to do so they explicitly don’t have to deal with all that.
Yes, this is good, but the FTC's ruling does this as well so it's better. Only way a company could get around offering click to cancel would be to not offer online signup. Best of luck to those companies succeeding!
I imagine though that you'll still have companies trying to stretch the definition of "at least as easy as sign-up" to breaking point.
You didn't just "click to sign up", you probably filled in a sign-up form to create an account, clicked on a link in your email to validate your account, then filled in another form to add payment info.
I wouldn't be surprised to see companies saying we can have multiple, multi-page 'exit' forms and an "Are you sure?" email and still be FTC compliant.
Providing customer service, including cancellation requests, is a fundamental part of running any customer-facing service.
If you can't manage that within the "willingness to pay for the service" then perhaps you shouldn't be running said service in the first place. Because soon enough your customers will have issues and nowhere to turn to, and then they won't be customers anymore (unless, you know, you make it a pain in their asses to leave).
Weird straw man. No one said that there shouldn’t be customer service on offer. The statement I originally made was that a company shouldn’t be legally bound to provide customer service in every single possible channel of communication (eg handwritten napkins).
I said that it’s actually good to be required to provide cancellation through the same channel that the service was initiated from. I’m pro customer service, anti absurdist requirements.
Processing napkin cancellation requests requires just about as much work as any other form of "manual" request -- whether that's over email, phone, etc.
There is nothing special about processing a "napkin cancellation" or whatever other form, the process is the same: find the account, do whatever verification needs to be done, and cancel it on the backend. In the end, you still have to have a manual cancellation pipeline powered by customer service. Whether that's because a customer can't find the button, wants human confirmation that it's been cancelled, whathaveyou. An automated system will never cover 100% of your customer base.
There is no strawman. Manual cancellation requests, just like any other manual request, is a standard part of Customer Service. If you can't provide CS, then you shouldn't be operating a customer-facing service.
> Processing napkin cancellation requests requires just about as much work as any other form of "manual" request -- whether that's over email, phone, etc.
The costs of running phone support are absurd. You have literally no idea what you’re talking about. Even just spend like 5 seconds considering how you’re going to go through the process you laid out when someone hands you a napkin they wrote on LOL
No it shouldn't and that should be obvious.
> Plus, this ignores practically the entirety of the rest of their comment, where they explain that the extreme openness just means that companies make it absurdly easy to do so they explicitly don’t have to deal with all that.
Yes, this is good, but the FTC's ruling does this as well so it's better. Only way a company could get around offering click to cancel would be to not offer online signup. Best of luck to those companies succeeding!