Codejnki's Blog

I’ve been a subscriber to XM radio now for just over two years.  I can’t say that I listened to too many stations on it.  I think I had a grand total of 10 stations pre-set on my radio that I would occasionally flip between, and one of them being the Detroit weather and traffic channel.  This fall though when Sirius and XM merged, XM radio seemed to get the short end of the deal.

There were two stations that I primarily listened to, Ethel and Lucy (part of XM’s alternative trio of Fred , Ethel , and Lucy ).  Ethel played the current alternative rotation from today’s bands.  Lucy played the “golden age” of alternative “from the time your first girlfriend dumped you, till your first wife divorced you.”  Basically very late 80’s up till about a year old.  The station was great.  It had no DJ’s, just occasional bumps that were hilarious.  All in all Lucy was the station I listened to the most and it sounded as if someone had stuck my iPod on shuffle and let it rip.

That is till about a month ago when Lucy ceased to be, and Lithium set it’s fat ass on my radio dial.  While Lucy played a vast assortment of music from my most impressionable era, Lithium seems to think that the only bands ever involved in the alternative music scene are Nirvana (2 songs), Pearl Jam (3 songs), Bush (entire catalog), and Silverchair (1 song).  This last band is the reason why yesterday I called and canceled my subscription.

Silverchair is famous for being a group of tweeners from Australia back in the 90’s who came to prominence with an album called Frogstomp which (if memory serves me correctly) included a song about having sex with your grandmother.  Let us just say that I am not a fan of Silverchair.  Personally I rank them one rung below Bush on the hate scale.  And for those of you who know me, you know why I hate Bush.

So yesterday I decided to go do a quick beer run.  I get in the car and Silverchair is playing on the former Lucy.  Like instinct I switch over to the former Ethel, only to find Silverchair playing.

At that point I was through.  I do not need to pay $12.95 a month so that a band I can’t stand listening to can play at the exact same time on the two main stations I listen to.

I got home and called up customer service, because in this great age you can sign up for service on the web, you just can’t cancel it.  I navigate through the menus and get to my customer support representative.  I tell him that I wish to cancel my account.  And like the good customer service rep that he is, he asks why.  So I told him:

“I don’t like the new music line up.”
“You say you don’t like the new music line up.”
“Yes, you got rid of the two stations I listened to and I don’t like the replacements.”

And immediately, without missing a beat, direct from the customer service play book:

“Well sir, I am sorry to hear that you don’t like the replacement channels.  We are supposed to be getting some of the channels back at the first of the year, we don’t know which ones just yet, but at the first of the year some of them will be coming back.  What if I was to give you one free month so that you can get to the new year and see if the channels you like come back.  And then if you still don’t like it the you can call us back and cancel then.”

“I don’t think you understand, I’ve stopped listening to the service.”  (Which is essentially true.  I’ve been on a strict NPR diet since the summer and only used the XM radio on the weekends if I went places.)  ”And today when I got in the car to listen to the service, you had a band I can’t stand playing on the two stations I listen to at the exact same time.”

Now wait for it.

“Well sir I am very sorry that you are feeling upset about the current music mix on the service, what if I was to give you two free months so that you can see what the new stations are.”

I was waiting for the two free months.  You are trained during the customer service inductee seminars that you are allowed to give two free months to any customer who calls you with no questions asked.  No management approval, no supervisory sign off, basically if you call up any monthly billed service to bitch and complain, you’ll get two free months.  The idea behind the two free months is that most people are calling up because they are pissed off right this second.  If we give them two free months they will eventually forget why they called up in the first place, and resume using the service in a day or two, and will resume paying for it once the two free months is up.

There are of course some people who simply call up repeatedly knowing they can get two free months.  During my time in the trenches I once started talking a guy in to canceling his account because in the preceding eight months he had only paid for two of them.  ”Sir I see by your records here that in the eight months that you’ve been a subscriber, you’ve had six months worth of credits issued to your account due to service interruptions.  If I was you I would seriously consider just canceling our service if you are that unhappy with it.”  It was at this moment that I pulled up his usage and saw that he was at least a 10 hour a day user.  ”I also see that you do use the internet service quite a lot.  Maybe you should look at finding more reliable service since you do seem to use it quite a lot.”  It was at this moment that the caller realized that I wasn’t going to be giving him two free months and instantly started to back pedal on all the issues he was currently experiencing.  I documented up his account that he was essentially a freeloader and that no more credits were to be issued.  My hope is that any rep who handled him after me would take the same approach I did.

Back to our regularly scheduled rant.

Anyway my XM Radio rep had pulled out the requite two free months card and I wasn’t biting.  I told him that I wanted to cancel and that maybe if I see that the lineup has changed next year I’ll start it back up.

“Sir, for our information, if there was one thing that we could have done to keep you as a subscriber what would it have been?”

“You should have left the radio stations I liked alone.”

A few moments of furious typing away by the rep later and I was hurried off to an automated customer service satisfaction survey where I indicated (on a scale of 1-5) that I was very unlikely to recommend XM Radio to someone in the future.

Yes, I hate Silverchair and Bush that much.