XBox Livid

A few months ago, I was playing some XBox games with a friend of mine on his 360. We couldn’t access certain features of the game and we thought it might be because I didn’t have a Gold membership for my account. So, I went ahead and signed up even though I don’t have an XBox, but of course, that didn’t end up being the issue, so we still couldn’t play what we wanted to. Fun! I tried to cancel my subscription both via his XBox and online that night and discovered that they require you to call to cancel. I knew immediately that would be a pain in the ass. They obviously made the conscious decision to not give any convenient ways of canceling accounts. Thus, I could only assume that forcing customers to talk to someone was intended to make it even harder, at least in part by having the customer service representative make the process as difficult as possible.

So I procrastinated calling them for a while, as I loathe these kinds of situations, but finally called this morning. I went through an automated voice menu, of course, and eventually got to a menu where one of the options was ‘Cancel My XBox Live Account’, so I selected that option. I was then connected to a customer service representative. He confirmed that I wanted to cancel my account and then proceeded to have me confirm all kinds of details about my account. He made me repeat and spell everything, sometimes more than once. I got the distinct impression that it wasnt that he didn’t understand, but that he was trained to make the process as difficult and frustrating as possible in the hopes that the customer would give up and change his mind. It just wasn’t believable to me that he was that inept, despite my unwavering faith in the capacity of humans to be complete idiots.

So after we get through that painful process, he informs me that he cannot actually help me with my request. He has to transfer me to the Billing and Cancellations department. Given that the menu option I chose in the automated voice menu was “Cancel My XBox Live Account”, it was perplexing to me that I was transferred to someone who couldn’t help me with that request. Furthermore, he confirmed at the beginning of our conversation that what I wanted was to cancel my account, so if he couldn’t help me, why didn’t he just transfer me immediately to someone who could. Let’s see…could it be an attempt to make the process frustrating enough that I might give up? No, they wouldn’t do that, I’m sure.

He then proceeds to put me on hold for about 6 minutes, coming back every few minutes to tell me how busy Billing and Cancellations is and that someone will be with me shortly. Finally, a woman, who I’m sure was from a totally different department and not sitting at the desk right next to his, picks up the line. She proceeds to have me repeat all the same information to verify my account as the first guy. I know, it’s a big shock. You couldn’t have seen that coming the second the first guy told me that he was going to have to transfer me to someone else. I mean, I’m sure Microsoft really wants to help facilitate good customer service experiences and wouldn’t needlessly ask people to repeat information over and over in the hopes of wearing them down.

Once we were finished going over every detail of my account again, she began the “talk the customer out of canceling” portion of the conversation. She asked me my reason for canceling, as I knew she would before I even called. I explained to her that I dont have an XBox, that I subscribed at a friend’s house a few months ago but havent used any membership features since then, so it’s not remotely worth it to me. I was pretty sure she hadn’t heard that reason too often, if at all, before. Like a true trooper, though, she managed to come up with some retorts that I’m not even sure were from her training manual. They just seemed too ridiculous to be official, but maybe I’m giving Microsoft too much credit.

Her counter offers included, “You should consider buying your own XBox because you know, you can transfer this account to your own XBox.” Okay, yeah, I’ll go spend a few hundred bucks so we can avoid this hassle. Another suggestion was, “Are you sure you don’t have a friend or family member with an XBox that would like to take over your account?” Uh…seriously? ‘Hey, Bob, I was going to cancel my XBox account, but then I realized that if you take it over, and we go through a bunch of hassle to change all the billing and contact information, and you want a gamer tag that represents who I am and not who you are, it would just make more sense. Oh, and *your* XBox Live Account, well, you can just get someone else to take that over, because you don’t want to cancel that either. It just doesn’t make sense if you think about it.’

So after I deflected all that crap, she said she would cancel the renewal charge to my credit card, but not the account so I could keep using it. Yes, thank you for not deleting my free gamer tag. Although, as a final ’screw you’ to someone who made it through the cancellation gauntlet, I wouldn’t put it past Microsoft.