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Comment by wing-_-nuts | Hacker News Reader

Calling comcast customer support almost guarantees this happens. You call in, repeatedly ask for a representative, they will hang up on you. The only way I've reliably been able to talk to anyone to say you wish to 'Talk to a representative about cancelling my account'.

TBH, I kind of dread when they start incorporating LLMs or better ai, because it will be truly impossible to speak to a human anymore.

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> The only way I've reliably been able to talk to anyone to say you wish to 'Talk to a representative about cancelling my account'.

Threatening to leave is also a reliable technique to stop ridiculous price hikes and even get hefty discounts.

Sometimes you have to talk to someone on the "retention team." At other times you can do it online. Most recently I preserved the NYT intro rate of $4 every 4 weeks (instead of $25) and I got a 33% discount on an Adobe subscription after they announced a 50% price hike and I started the cancellation process.

My uncle calls up all his service providers at least twice a year and threatens to cancel just to see what they offer him. It's had a very positive ROI.

I'm surprised they haven't caught on yet, sounds like all it would take would be a note on his account, this is a fairly well known strategy.

Maybe he follows through with it if he doesn't like the offer. Systematic threats don't have to be empty.

You have to accept that they might actually cancel the account, and deal with the inconvenience of actually switching (which may be worth it anyway).

Not really you can usually back out before finally pulling the trigger.

I tried that bluff with a cable company once and they put me on hold for a bit, I thought it was to transfer me to retention department so I can get a sweet discount. Then the rep comes back on and said “Ok I canceled your account. Anything else i can do?”

Yeah this does occasionally happen. Had it happen with a credit card that had hiked their annual fee or something like that. Best to be prepared with a backup service or be OK doing without.

I’ve had good luck not specifically saying “I want to cancel” but something along the lines of “I’m thinking about cancelling, the price is just too high” but that doesn’t always get you the very best offers.

Comcast specifically though throttled the retention policies for Sky Italia when they bought them, it used to be that you could get a 60% discount easily, after their purchase it became at most 40% if I remember well

> TBH, I kind of dread when they start incorporating LLMs or better ai, because it will be truly impossible to speak to a human anymore.

I think my bank did that as the experience looked far from the usual chat bot. I just had to say "you cannot help me I need to talk to a human".

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