A guide to winning the customer service cancellation phone battle

AOL VP Ryan Block’s cancellation nightmare phone call with Comcast’s customer service went insanely viral this week, drawing a contrite canned response from Comcast’s public relations group and likely resulting in the firing of the overly zealous customer service employee who badgered Block for 10 solid minutes about his request to terminate service. Unfortunately, Block’s experience is far from unique. Putting aside the Comcast representative’s hilariously insensitive tenacity ("This phone call is a really, actually amazing example of why I don't want to stay with Comcast," Block said at one point), terrible phone-based customer service is standard operating procedure for most companies.

There is some delicious irony in the fact that Block is an AOL employee, since AOL’s ludicrous and borderline-abusive customer retention tactics are the stuff of legends. However, in this instance, Block's affiliation with AOL was immaterial: he was just another customer being forced to fight a war to cancel his Internet service.

Why do companies like Comcast and AOL make it so hard to pull the plug? Do customer service representatives get some kind of incentive for keeping customers from canceling? Is there anything you can do to power through their garbage and get what you want without having to verbally fight it out, Block-style?

The answers to those questions are "because they like steady revenue, yes, and yes," but you might not like the details. The good news, though, is that in spite of the tricks and traps they'll hit you with, you can get what you want from a company’s customer service organization every single time. The bad news is that it will often require you to cast off some or all of your human decency and transform into the kind of customer that the company would rather get rid of than argue with.

Strap on your angry pants, because we’re going to learn how to fight back.

Taking advantage of your agreeability

Large companies that get revenue from subscription services—like Comcast—will invest a lot of time and effort into keeping that revenue flowing. Subscriber revenue is a reliable income stream that can be accounted for and forecasted against, and being able to predict revenue in the near future is extremely important for companies—especially ones that are publicly traded. When a customer like Block calls in to cancel service, it’s not just the immediate reduction in subscriber income that the company wants to stop (though that’s, of course, important), but there's also the potential disruption in earnings. If too many people cancel, the company might miss its quarterly guidance, which will impact its stock price.

To work around this, companies typically have a "retention department," a group of customer service representatives empowered to dangle some extra carrots in front of would-be departing customers to tempt them into staying. However, retention departments don’t just toss out offers of free upgrades and low rates—they use subtle (and sometimes not-so-subtle) psychological bullying to get people to agree to not cancel their service. And a lot of people just let them.

Consensus is the lubricant of all social interaction.

Humans are by and large wired to be agreeable—consensus is the lubricant of all social interaction. Disagreement is awkward and embarrassing, and many people will go out of their way to fake agreement in order to avoid feeling embarrassed or to save someone else from suffering perceived embarrassment. Retention department call scripts use the natural desire for consensus to emotionally manipulate customers, and it works.

This is done by putting the retention rep in the conversational role of the company and forcing the customer to confront the rep with their objections. The rep might ask the customer why they want to cancel their service, and the customer—if they choose to play along—might respond by saying, "I feel like your service costs too much." Even polite confrontation like this—having to voice an objection to the representative about "their" service—can be hard for some people to engage in.

The rep would then typically respond by mitigating the objection: "Well," the rep might say, "what if I told you that I can cut your monthly rate in half? That would help a lot, right? Then you could stay!"

If the customer sticks to their guns, the rep might press further, perhaps with something like, "Help me understand: I lowered your rates because you said they were too high, but you still want to cancel? There must be something else wrong with our service that I can help fix!" The combination of cloying politeness and deft emotional appeal works very well at battering down objections. The goal is to make the customer feel like they’re being unreasonable—after all, look how nice the rep is being! Look at how far they’re willing to go to help!

The rep may indeed be a great person who’s politely trying to get the customer to stay, but it’s also the rep’s job to stop customers from leaving. Call center employees in retention groups typically have performance metrics that they must meet based around how many "saves" they get; former Comcast customer service representative and redditor "txmadison" explained in great detail earlier this week how Comcast retention representatives can lose thousands of dollars of their monthly income by letting too many customers leave the fold. For representatives in that position, customer cancellations can make the difference between paying rent for the month or not.

This kind of pay-based negative reinforcement is sickening and sad, but it also works—retention representatives have a personal stake in preventing customers from leaving. It also puts departing customers in something of a moral dilemma, since the customers have an active role in determining whether or not the retention reps get income (as noted by txmadison, the reps' hourly pay is between $10 to $12 per hour, with the majority of their monthly income derived from "save"-based commissions).

As a customer, you have to make a choice: are you responsible for the actions and choices of another person, or not? Canceling your service can have a real impact on another person, but is that your fault?

As long as Comcast and other companies try to use my own human decency against me, all bets are off.

Fighting dirty

Don't let the enemy pick the battlefield, and don't let them pick the rules of the battle. The easiest and simplest way to fight back against a retention rep who’s gone off the reservation is to simply hang up and call back. Companies like Comcast have vast armies of customer service personnel, and if you’re not getting what you want out of the person you’re talking to, you can easily talk to someone else who might be more amenable. Former Comcast CSR txmadison explains that a Comcast-specific tactic with a high chance of success is to "keep hitting 1," which will eventually get you connected to the "new service" department—staffed with people who are just as equipped to help you as any other Comcast CSR, in spite of the department's name.

Don’t make the mistake of asking for a supervisor, either—the call center industry has been wise to that trick for decades. It’s unlikely that you’ll get anyone on the line who has any greater ability to help you. Rather, you’ll just be connected to someone who has even less of an incentive to fix your problem than the regular representative (typically, a call center supervisor’s performance metrics aren’t directly tied to the number of calls he or she personally handles).

Instead, just end the call. Don’t say goodbye, don’t raise your voice, and don’t argue. Just hang up and redial. You’ll get put back into the queue and you’ll have to start the process over again, but you’ll start it with a different rep—perhaps one who cares a whole hell of a lot less than the last person you talked to.

A call center representative nearing the end of his or her shift is the golden ticket. This is someone who likely wants to skip quickly through their required script, do the bare minimum, and then end the call. When you have a specific goal to accomplish, that’s the person you want to be talking to: the person who wants to get you off the phone as badly as you want to be off the phone.

Instant escalation

There’s a chance that if you hang up and call back, you’ll have to fight through a first tier of troubleshooting or customer service before you’re connected to the right department. With some companies, this isn’t too hard—you can simply tell the person who picks up that you want to cancel your service, and they’ll immediately bounce you to the appropriate retention department.

Unreasonableness will go a long, long way toward getting what you want.

However, others are less compliant. Some companies will force you to engage with a (totally powerless and unable to help you) first-tier customer service representative before passing you through to their retention group. So if you’ve hung up and called back, you face the possibility of having to go through this a second time.

Here is where a bit of unreasonableness will go a long, long way toward getting what you want. Politeness has its place, but this is not that place. To get pushed immediately through to retention, get mad. You don’t have to swear at them—cursing at a call center rep at any point is a great way to get them to hang up on you—but anger will serve you a lot better here than being nice.

"Look," you can say, "I was just talking with the retention group about canceling and we got disconnected. I don’t have time for this today. I am extremely frustrated and angry and I need you to put me back through to them right now."

If they try to guide you back to a script, get angrier and interrupt them. Raise your voice and talk over them. Demand an immediate escalation to retention—or, if you don’t want to be so exact-sounding, demand to be escalated "to the people who can cancel my account right now." You often won’t even have to give the representative any personal details. Enough bluster and bluff will almost always get you pushed through within thirty seconds. The trick is to be exasperated, angry, and frustrated—but not so angry that you’re yelling or threatening. If you have a good extemporaneous reading voice, it might be helpful to write down a quick script.

As an aside, this is also an excellent method to bypass a company’s unskilled (and sometimes offshored) first-tier technical support and gain access to second-tier support. All you have to be willing to do is be a jerk. It can be surprisingly hard at first, but with practice, it gets a lot easier.

Bypassing those God-forsaken voice recognition systems

Sometimes, you won't have to argue with a human being, rather it's an automated IVR system on the other end (that’s "interactive voice response" systems—the official name for the type of system you typically interact with when dialing in to a call center). I despise voice recognition IVR. Nothing says "Our company is willing to do just about anything to lower how much it costs to deal with you stupid customers" than a voice recognition system picking up when you call in for help.

Fortunately, there are two easy ways to get past them. About 75 percent of the time, these systems can be bypassed by madly tapping out random combinations of 0, #, and * on your phone’s keypad. After a few seconds, most systems will give up the ghost and connect you to a person.

For those that don’t, screaming "customer service, customer service, fuck you, customer service you piece of shit machine" will invariably do the trick. Some IVR systems can key on your tone of voice or on swear words, and the systems use those as triggers to pass you on to a human operator.

Is this wrong?

After you’ve gamed your way back to a new retention rep, all you have to do is be firm and not respond to the psychological baiting. You can always expect some amount of pushback from the retention rep. After all, their job is to keep you from canceling, and it’s perfectly reasonable to be expected to answer a couple of questions about why you’re doing just that. However, if they begin badgering you, drop the call like it’s a three-days-dead rat and get a different person on the phone.

The obvious objection to doing this—and to arguing your way through the call system—is that it feels wrong. It’s potentially abusive to employees who are just doing their job and who have no beef with you. It forces you to aggressively, actively pursue the resolution you want rather than passively allow the company’s call center to come up with an acceptable resolution.

What's wrong are companies who conflate metrics with customer satisfaction.

Whether or not you’re morally OK with steamrolling call center employees to get what you want is something you’ll have to decide for yourself. Speaking as someone who spent a long time manning phones in customer service, though, I’m perfectly fine with it. You’re not necessarily angry at the person you’re talking to, and chances are your demand for escalation or your demand to cancel your account won’t negatively affect them. Retention metrics are typically laid down with the understanding that you can’t "save" every customer; some are hell bent for leather on canceling.

In fact, you can turn the tables on the rep by using their own tactics against them: try to draw them into agreeing with you by explicitly stating that this isn’t the employee’s fault and that you need help. Take a breath, ask their name, and then say something like, "Listen, Bob"—assuming their name is Bob, obviously—"I am very frustrated and angry. I want you to know that I am not frustrated or angry at you—I know you have a job to do and I appreciate that, and this is not your fault. However, I am spitting nails over here and I need your help." This is a great way to pierce the customer service veil and simultaneously appeal to human kindness, all the while beating them at their own game.

Ultimately, the thing to focus on here is that what’s truly wrong are companies who conflate easily measured metrics like call time with actual customer satisfaction. What’s wrong is being forced to smile and play nice with a service provider who bilks you for potentially hundreds of dollars per month but makes you interface with barely trained call center employees when their service falters. Worse, some companies don’t even care enough about you to let you talk to a person at all.

So don’t be afraid to pull out your own tricks to get what you want. If that means hanging up on a recalcitrant employee and powering through the call tree to get someone else on the line, then do it. Life’s too short to spend it arguing with customer service reps.