The UK government has a proposed law that customers must be able to end a subscription in a single clear process and all subscriptions entered into online must be capable of being ended online. Seems that if the US pushed this kind of law it'd have a significant effect on improving online services.
SiriusXM needs to be reported mercilessly. Their cancellation process requires chatting with someone who tries to offer you better deals to stay, which of course only last for a few months, then the original price kicks back in. It takes 15 minutes to go through the process. The sad thing is that I'd love to activate their service for a month here or month there, but their cancellation process is too painful to do so, so they just lose out on my business, and piss me off at the same time. A real lose-lose scenario!
I canceled my SiriusXM sub a couple months after the merger. I was an XM subscriber that was "merged in" and when the merger finished, one of the big reasons why I was an XM subscriber (no talking DJ's on the channels I listened to) vanished and suddenly all the old channels I listened to had talking DJ's everywhere.
I had to wait a couple months to cancel because of a weird clause requiring some amount of "sub time" before one could get a pro-rata refund in the agreement.
Cancellation had to be by phone, and the SiriusXM person went so far as to offer a full year of free service to keep me on board. She was quite shocked when I told her, no, not even a free year will keep me as a subscriber. I also asked her to be sure to tell her managers that the reason why they lost a sub was adding talking DJ's to channels that previously had none.
I switched to a commercial free, DJ free mp3 player for my commute, and eventually the "mp3 player" was replaced by my cell phone.
One problem I've encountered is the inability to remove a payment method for an active subscription. For example, I pay for several subscriptions with PayPal. I recently wanted to modify my PayPal preference for a particular subscription so that it used my credit card rather than checking account. I normally do this by deleting PayPal and then re-adding it, which goes through the login and account selection flow. I was prohibited from doing this, because since it is an active subscription, I was not allowed to delete the only payment method on it.
However, PayPal has some pretty slick tools for managing recurring payments and subscriptions, so I think I could manage it from the dashboard over there. Haven't checked yet.
That "single, clear process" should be the website & app of the card issuer the subscription is through. The user should also be able to see clear limits & term durations via the card, before commute to the service, provider be-damned.
