A Customer Tried to Cancel Their SiriusXM Subscription. The Company’s Response Is the 1 Thing No Brand Should Ever Do

As a general rule, if you can sign up for a subscription service online simply by entering your information and clicking a button, you should be able to cancel it just as easily. If you make it hard for customers to cancel your service by forcing them to call you or jump through some other hoops, you are most definitely doing it wrong. 

I’m sure there are people who run businesses who believe that introducing friction will help them reduce churn and keep more customers, but that is a terrible way to run a business. I mean, at the most basic level, should you really be trying that hard to keep people who don’t want to be your customers?

I suppose you could make the argument that those people are still giving you money because they are still customers and, as a business, that’s a good thing. You would, of course, be wrong. Also, do you really want unhappy customers? 

There are, however, a lot of companies that take this approach. So many that the Federal Trade Commission has proposed rules to force companies to make cancellation as hassle-free as signing up. 

“The proposed rule would require that companies make it as easy to cancel a subscription as it is to sign up for one,” says FTC chairperson Lina Kahn. “The proposal would save consumers time and money, and businesses that continued to use subscription tricks and traps would be subject to stiff penalties.”

For now, however, we’re stuck with terrible customer experiences. Consider the experience I had trying to cancel our SiriusXM account. It wasn’t good. 

If you want to cancel your satellite radio subscription, there’s a nice button that says cancel. Unfortunately, if you click it, it takes you to this screen, where you discover that to actually cancel your subscription, you have to chat with a live agent.

After waiting for 14 minutes for the “live agent” to enter the chat, I was asked why I wanted to cancel. The simple request to cancel the subscription wasn’t enough. The agent wanted to know why, presumably so they could try to convince me to stick around or sell me something else. 

In case it isn’t obvious, the reason people hate talking to customer service at most companies is that it always feels like the people you’re speaking with are trained to make the company more money, not to actually, you know, serve the customer. This is a great example.

Eventually, I was able to get the agent to cancel the subscription, only to be told that I would still have to pay for an entire year since the annual subscription had already been renewed. Apparently, it was a “valid charge and your service is automatically renewed unless you contact us to make changes.” 

When asked why a customer would still be expected to pay for a service they no longer had, the agent disconnected from the chat. Either the agent simply got tired of chatting, or SiriusXM’s chat technology is as bad as its cancellation policy. 

I reached out to SiriusXM for comment on this story but did not receive a response to my questions; I will update if the company does give me a response.

A quick look at the customer agreement confirms that, in fact, SiriusXM will automatically charge you for a renewal for the same amount of time as the original subscription. That’s reasonable, but if a customer wants to cancel, they shouldn’t be on the hook for services they won’t use. 

A paid Subscription, including those with a free or discounted introductory period, will continue for the length of your selected paid Plan (“Subscription Term”) and will automatically renew for additional like periods or any other length described in our offer, unless you cancel prior to that renewal, your Subscription is cancelled by us, or you select a different Plan. Your account will automatically be charged (or you will be billed, as applicable) at the rates in effect at the time of each renewal, plus fees and taxes. If you do not accept the change in pricing, you have the right to reject the change by cancelling your Subscription prior to the change taking effect.

I guess that means that SiriusXM is justified in making its customers pay if they don’t remember to cancel prior to their renewal. On the other hand, just because you can do something doesn’t mean you should. In this case, SiriusXM should definitely not expect customers to pay for an entire year of service when they cancel it shortly after the automatic renewal.

To be fair, I was eventually connected to a second agent who confirmed that the subscription was canceled and that I would not be responsible for an entire year’s subscription to a service I no longer had. While that was much appreciated, I couldn’t help but think that the entire thing should have been so much easier, and definitely should not have taken a half hour of my life.

Every company should make it as easy as Netflix, which has a giant “cancel subscription” button right on the account page. Netflix isn’t scared of people unsubscribing from their service. It could not be more simple for anyone to stop paying money if they no longer want Netflix. They don’t ask you to call or talk to anyone or wait in a live chat queue. They recognize that putting your customers first, even when they’re actively trying to not be your customer, is just the right thing to do.