Sirius, I’ve been enjoying your satellite radio service, but this morning you did something stupid.

Don’t know about you, but as a customer I don’t want some damn machine calling me unsolicited. Whatever brainiac dreamed up having a computer call customers being some kind of wonderful customer service should be locked in a room and forced to listen to recordings for the rest of their lives.

A little backstory for readers. About a month ago I canceled the subscription for my son’s Sirius Stiletto. He hadn’t listened to it in months and there seemed no point in paying for a subscription he wasn’t using. Conversely, I still regularly listen to and enjoy my Sirius radio.

Fast forward to this morning. The phone rings and it’s a recorded message from some lady at Sirius telling me that my service had been interrupted and Sirius didn’t want me to miss out on their programming. My first thought? They didn’t cancel both radios by mistake, did they?

I looked up my account and it showed my radio was still active. I turned the radio on and still had programming. There was no “interruption” in service, everything was fine.

What the recorded message should have said — cough, personalization, cough — was this: “Dear Sirius customer, our records indicate that you canceled one of your two radios. If you should ever want to reactivate this radio, we’re offering you a special deal, just call ____.”

Better yet, have a real human being phone me and follow up with how my subscription has been going. Then slide into the retention spiel at some point by asking if anybody else in the household could use the Stiletto. You see, I already told them when I went to cancel a month ago that my son wasn’t using it any more.

That would be personalization. That would be smart retention. Dumb retention is sending a generic machine generated response to your existing customer and making him think you’d screwed something up and canceled both his accounts.

Sirius and XM are still going through the motions to become one company and I hope somebody over there takes a look at bonehead customer service moves like this. Also the fact that you can’t simply cancel the service from the website, you have to call them. We can sign up and activate service from the website but cannot cancel it? Lame. Clark Howard calls this kind of thing customer noservice.

I decided to ring up Sirius this morning and ask them please not to have machines call me any more. Spoke to a nice guy named Lamar who agreed with me that the machines are a bad idea. I also pointed out that the website should allow people to cancel their accounts without requiring a phone call because it’s possible to setup an account without a call. He indicated it was for security reasons.

Ahh, but no security reasons prevent someone from setting up an account and paying Sirius — only to close one. Crap dice. Keep the machines in movies like Terminator and for handling non-human interaction. If you want to practice great customer service and improve your radio subscription retention, use real people trying to really relate to real human situations, not machines.

I explained to Lamar how this customer (moi) would have responded much more positively if a nice guy like he had called me up and said: “Hello sir this is Lamar from Sirius, I see you canceled your son’s Stiletto subscription a month ago and still are using the Starmate and I wanted to personally thank you on behalf of Sirius for your continued business. We also noticed that you only had the Stiletto activated less than a year and am wondering if there were any other questions or concerns with the Stiletto besides your son not using it any more that might have kept the subscription active? Do you have anybody else in the house or a friend who might be willing to use the Stiletto? We can offer you a discount for ___ if it is reactivated within ___ time.”

Line up 100 customers and ask them if they’d rather have the Terminator.

Did this post make you go hmm?

Maybe Related Posts (plugin generated)

• Find a clear channel at Sirius
• Sirius to release portable unit that stores music
• Sirius to charge subscribers $2 more for higher quality internet streaming
• Sirius and XM kissing in a tree, now waiting for regulatory approval
• SIRIus continues to narrow the gap with XM
• XM and Sirius, side-by-side feature comparison