Customer Dis-service

Satellite radio is nice, but it is by no means a necessity.  With that in mind, we cancelled our service earlier this year.  It was easy enough to cancel, but then things got difficult.  I need to vent, so here goes.

Seems about right

April - I called to cancel.  They offered us a two month free usage of their service in an attempt to get us to keep paying for a service we rarely used.  I informed them that if I had to do anything, even as little as call back in to terminate the free offer, I didn't want it.  I was assured that it would automatically end and I had nothing to do. They sent us a refund check for the unused months we had already paid for so I thought we were done.

I was just a little wrong.

June - We got a notice that our subscription was about to expire due to lack of payment and that we would need to make a payment to continue with them.  Knowing that the service would discontinue automatically, I ignored their request for cash.  When we received the third letter I called in and politely asked what the hell was going on.  I was informed that I did, in fact, need to cancel the service...again. 

The less than helpful person on the other end of the line asked me to hold while she transferred me to someone who could cancel for us.  Apparently she had not been trained in the art of closing an account.  She transferred me and their phone system hung up on me.  I called back and the same thing happened.  The third time I called I told the person just to cancel us and be done.  She said OK, tried to transfer me again for good measure, and the phone went dead.

July - More notices.  Not only were we getting at least one a week, now I was getting calls on my cell phone from an automated service telling me to pay up or be cut off. 

August - At this point we were getting about four notices per week, and probably the same amount of phone calls.  I called them again and went through the same disconnecting process.

September - After months of notices they finally turned off the service.  We hadn't used it in the past few months, but did check it every so often to see if they had figured out how to stop it.

October - We got a letter from a collection agency.  We were informed that XM had turned our account over to them in an effort to collect the past due balance.  I called and explained what happened.  They, of course, could do nothing so I had to write a letter and file an appeal with XM directly.

As of the date of this post we are still waiting for XM to reply.  I'm sure they will claim not to have received our letter and want us to pay the past due balance.

Anyone else had issues with XM?  I can't imagine we are the only ones to fight this battle.  I just wonder how many people pay the bill to get XM off their back.  I also wonder if there is some sort of class action lawsuit pending.

Their attempts to squeeze a little bit of cash out of their customers seem to be a bad business practice, if you ask me.