Aaaaaaagh!!!! All I want to do is cancel my subscription

Making it super-hard to cancel a subscription does no one any favours.

I was on Trustpilot the other day looking at reviews of a magazine’s customer service operation, when I came across a post from what was clearly a very frustrated individual.

“Trying to cancel my subscription has been a nightmare,” he complained, the chatbot was “useless”, the website a “maze” and getting in touch with an actual human being a “bad joke”.

The poor man had “wasted hours navigating their broken system, only to be met with automated dead ends and unresponsive links.”

Their “so-called customer support” was an “insult to paying subscribers”. This was more than just poor service, he declared, it was “deliberate obstruction”.

Oh dear.

My hunch is that he won’t be subscribing again anytime soon, and if his perception of that magazine’s customer service becomes widespread, it’s likely to deter other people from taking out a subscription in the first place, certainly to that magazine and quite possibly to any magazine.

Customer service matters. That was the message I came away with from a recent interview I did with Adam Sherman, CEO of Air Business, for a (sponsored) article in the upcoming July / August issue of InPublishing magazine (not on our circulation list? Register here). So what is the experience our unfortunate Trustpilot reviewer should have received?

Listening to Adam, I would suggest it should have gone something like this:

• On-edge man goes to website. He has set aside a whole afternoon for this because he had heard how difficult cancelling a subscription could be, so he’s pleasantly surprised to see a clearly marked ‘customer service’ link, which he clicks…
• He selects the ‘speak to someone’ option and calls the number…
• Reassured when what appears to be a real person answers after a few rings…
• Expecting push back, and a tad defensively, he blurts out that he wants to cancel his subscription!!!!
• “No problem, I can help you with that,” says the agent…
• And breathe. The weight lifts from his shoulders. The tone is polite and professional. He begins to relax. Confident that he is being respected, he is happy to answer the agent’s questions about why he wants to cancel and to politely decline the admittedly tempting offers and remedies the agent puts forward; “no thank you”…
• When asked, he answers, “Of course, I would be happy to hear from you in the future.”
• Within a few minutes, the cancellation is complete and our happy now ex-subscriber puts the phone down. Satisfied, but also already a little nostalgic; after all, he did like the magazine, just struggled to find time to read it; might well try it again though. “What a top-notch outfit they are,” he sighed: “I must tell my wife / friends / relations / colleagues.” Now he wonders what he’s going to do with the rest of the afternoon he has booked off.

One year later… he receives an email from the magazine saying how much they were missing him and … he decides to resubscribe. After all, he had been missing them too; he had even bought his father-in-law a gift subscription to it at Christmas.

So impressed had he been with the professionalism of the outfit that he had even left a positive review on Trustpilot, not something he usually did…

Credit: James Evelegh, InPublishing (17.07.2025)