My Impromptus today is a typical mélange, offering politics, foreign affairs, sports, etc. If it is for you, it is for you: here. Let’s have some mail.
I led my column yesterday with a cable tale: a tale of trying to cancel my cable-TV service. This is not an easy task. Saturday Night Live parodied it, here. I linked to that sketch in my column. Readers have alerted me to an episode of South Park, which does the same thing: parody the difficulty of canceling cable. That bit is here. It is raunchy (for those who still care about those things, and, if you do, bless you).
A reader writes,
Jay,
I haven’t had to cancel cable, but your experience has made me set up a provisional plan. When asked, “Why do you want to cancel?” I’ll respond, “My appeal was denied. I have to report to prison in a few days.”
I’m not sure that will deter the employee, but it’s worth a shot, and creative.
A reader writes,
I, too, recently canceled my cable TV. For me, it was simple: I took the cable box to the local cable store. There was a small effort to have me purchase new services, but, alas, they failed.
Here is the financial tragedy. I have kept my Wi-Fi with this company. I asked the cost: $137.00! Well, I called their salesforce. Stupidity reigned. Would I like to purchase an assortment of products? No, was my reply. I own a business. I appealed to their sense of profitability. It is a tough task to reason with someone who is reading a script. I explained to them that their competitors would provide me Wi-Fi at one-third of their cost. It was like talking to a wall.
So, I’m shopping for new Wi-Fi. I’ll keep you posted.
Another reader writes,
Worse is trying to cancel phone service. Every year, they offer promotions that last only a year, hoping you won’t notice the price going up. Call in to complain and they say there are no new promotions. Then if you say you want to cancel, suddenly you get referred to a special department that — surprise! — offers a new one-year promotion. I do this every year, wasting 30 minutes to go through their gauntlet.
And now, a word from someone on the inside, so to speak:
Long ago, I worked in IT for a big wireless company. We supported call-center operations. Each company is different, of course, but we had our own “retention team” that tried to talk people out of canceling. They were very good at their job — I certainly would not have been. Anyway, the magic word when canceling is “escalate,” as in, “I need you to cancel my service or escalate this to a manager.”
In our call centers, any request for a manager had to be granted. The reps didn’t get to try to talk you out of it. It also represented failure: These requests were tracked by employee and woe to the person who had a lot of them — who had received a lot of requests.
In addition to “escalate,” the word “or” is important. The word “or” gives the employee an option: “Either cancel me [bad] or send me to your manager [worse].”
News you can use! My thanks to one and all readers and correspondents.