Canceling should be as easy as signing up.
I’ve been a Quicken Bill Pay customer for 5 years, probably closer 10. Their product generally works pretty well, but it hasn’t changed much in the last 5 years, and the generally crummy UI led me to look around for something better. This morning I signed up for Paytrust hoping it might be better since the web page looked slightly better and people seemed to give it decent reviews. I quickly realized that it’s just another front end for Metavante like Quicken Bill Pay is. In fact, they’re both owned by Intuit. I immediately sent an email to support saying I wanted to cancel my account, and got the following and email containing this:
If you still wish to close your account after reviewing some benefits of our service which are listed below, we ask that you please contact us at 1-800-729-8787 so that we may maintain the security of your account throughout the closure process. Your feedback is important to us.
Their website is secure enough for me to be able to empty my bank account from, but not secure enough to cancel my account from? I smell bullshit.
A friend of mine suggested a while back that we should have some law in place that says unless there is extenuating circumstances, you should be able to cancel any subscription service via the same medium you used to sign up for it. Perhaps legislation is going overboard, but this “I think you’re too lazy to call us up and cancel” tact that many companies seem to take is really bad customer service. You’d think they would realize that ultimately it just leaves a bad taste in people’s mouths about their company. I can’t see companies ever doing this unless they’re required to.