"... a consumer who accepts an automatic renewal or continuous service offer online shall be allowed to terminate the automatic renewal or continuous service exclusively online, which may include a termination email formatted and provided by the business that a consumer can send to the business without additional information."
But I have one recent anecdote that suggests this language is not specific enough to lead to a very good outcome.
I had a SiriusXM subscription for my car, and paid $52.21 for the past 12 months of service. And they wanted to renew me for something in the ballpark of $20/month ($240/year). I absolutely hate that business practice and having to go talk to them to negotiate a better rate, otherwise they auto-renew you for a much worse rate than you were already on.
So I went to cancel. There is no click to cancel option. You have to call or do online chat. I think the online chat is how they can say they follow California law.
It still took me about 30+ minutes to actually cancel the service, because the person responding to the chat has to run through a script to try to retain you. First they want to know if you are enjoying the service. Then they want to know what stations you like. Then it's "I'll switch you to this new plan that's only $12/month, can I go ahead and do that?"
All the while I'm telling them that the reason I'm cancelling is that they tried to auto-renew me to a much higher rate, and now they are making it super hard to cancel, which makes me want to cancel more.
So I had to go round and round insisting I wanted to cancel. Never did they offer me anything close to the previous rate I was paying. Though I see now that if I re-enabled my subscription I'd get close to that rate again for 6 months. But for a service that I only use when I don't have good cell phone coverage, and the annual time waste they put me through to avoid over paying... It's not worth it.
We talk about UI dark patterns but the people who try to retain you are trained in conversational dark patterns.
If anything these are deadlier in retention then in the first sale. I'm awful at sales but I like to drink with salespeople in hotel bars and otherwise pick their brains and I have had news paper ad and radio commercial salespeople share their retention playbooks with me. (e.g. "Don't you know your customers will think you went out of business if you stop running ads?")
SiriusXM is the worst. My subscription came with the car, but luckily it wasn't auto-renewed. However, after my subscription expires, I got calls every single day from SiriusXM trying to get me to subscribe again. And each time, they used a different number. It was ridiculous.
In the end, I just pick up the call, and put the phone in my pocket. They still insisted on calling for about half a year before giving up.
This is the one instance where I absolutely abuse the 'customer service' reps that call.
I had a similar thing with a previous car purchase -- Sirius would not get the hint that I had already canceled and didn't want to renew. At one point I stopped being nice and started being malicious. The calls quickly stopped after that. Amusingly, when I canceled siriusxm on the car I bought after, they never called once. I do so hope that means there's a note somewhere attached to my name that says "don't call."
Damn, I had that exact same experience. Eventually, in exasperation I said something like "I don't want you to respect my wishes, I want you to act on them." And somehow that did the trick and the CSR cancelled immediately. Of course, I then got increasingly insistent spam from them for the next year.
Some car companies require you to sign you up for a "free" SiriusXM subscription with a new car purchase, which you then have to go through the effort to cancel.
I told the dealership I'd never buy a car from their brand again because of this.
This really ought to be considered an illegal “tying arrangement” but since our antitrust laws are so poorly enforced and overly-emphasize price (ignoring things like quality and customer service) I doubt it’s even on anyone’s radar. The Chicago School strikes again, I suppose.
"... a consumer who accepts an automatic renewal or continuous service offer online shall be allowed to terminate the automatic renewal or continuous service exclusively online, which may include a termination email formatted and provided by the business that a consumer can send to the business without additional information."
But I have one recent anecdote that suggests this language is not specific enough to lead to a very good outcome.
I had a SiriusXM subscription for my car, and paid $52.21 for the past 12 months of service. And they wanted to renew me for something in the ballpark of $20/month ($240/year). I absolutely hate that business practice and having to go talk to them to negotiate a better rate, otherwise they auto-renew you for a much worse rate than you were already on.
So I went to cancel. There is no click to cancel option. You have to call or do online chat. I think the online chat is how they can say they follow California law.
It still took me about 30+ minutes to actually cancel the service, because the person responding to the chat has to run through a script to try to retain you. First they want to know if you are enjoying the service. Then they want to know what stations you like. Then it's "I'll switch you to this new plan that's only $12/month, can I go ahead and do that?"
All the while I'm telling them that the reason I'm cancelling is that they tried to auto-renew me to a much higher rate, and now they are making it super hard to cancel, which makes me want to cancel more.
So I had to go round and round insisting I wanted to cancel. Never did they offer me anything close to the previous rate I was paying. Though I see now that if I re-enabled my subscription I'd get close to that rate again for 6 months. But for a service that I only use when I don't have good cell phone coverage, and the annual time waste they put me through to avoid over paying... It's not worth it.