Here's a way to turn a happy customer into an unhappy customer in a hurry: sign them up for a magazine subscription they don't want, and then make them opt out to keep from automatically getting billed for it. One reader was upset to discover recently that's what Amazon was doing to him.
"I just got an email from Amazon 'promotions' that signed me up for a free magazine subscription to a fashion magazine called Allure," the reader wrote. "I've never seen anything like this from Amazon before in all my years of using their services. They not only signed me up for it without asking me -- which caused a double-take in and of itself -- but I have to explicitly opt out from the subscription and failure to do so means I will be automatically renewed and billed for this magazine in the future."
The reader had at first thought the e-mail might be some sort of phishing scam, but after examining the headers he determined the message really was from Amazon. "I immediately wrote the allure-optout@amazon.com address and opted out since I'm not female and have no interest in this stuff," he wrote. "I had to look the magazine up to see what it was even about. But what assurances do I have that they will honor this opt-out? What can I do to make sure Amazon stops all future such contest wins and auto-enrollments where I may be billed at some point?"
The reader wrote Amazon to complain, and he eventually received an apology from them and assurances he would not be subscribed to Allure. But he still finds it hard to understand why Amazon would take such an approach. "Providing an opt-out mechanism that requires my attention to cancel a billable action is NOT appropriate," he wrote. "If you stop to think about it, what happens if my spam filter had picked this notice up and I just started receiving this magazine, clueless as to why and then one day found the charge on my credit card with no explanation? This doesn't sound anything at all like the Amazon.com I've always known."
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