I’ve had an Adobe Creative Cloud subscription for a few years now, under the monthly subscription where you don’t pay for it the months you don’t use it, and I tend to use it about…once a month. I sort of realized today how dreadful a scam that was/how much I was paying for it, and went and bought Photoshop Elements, which has really got everything I’m realistically going to use, in order to replace the Creative Cloud subscription.
They made me talk to a customer support person when I tried to cancel, and first they offered me a month’s free subscription. I said, “How about you start with a five year free subscription, and then we’ll talk?”
They then offered me a reduced plan, half the cost of the subscription I had. I said “Or how about I just pay €72 for something I can use forever?”
Then they said there would be a €150 cancellation fee, and was that okay with me. I said not even slightly. They said I’d been on a yearly subscription and there was a cancellation fee to end it. I pointed out it wasn’t a new yearly subscription and I saw no reason why I should pay a fee.
In the meantime I was reporting on all of this via Twitter, because of course I was, and the Adobe customer care people over THERE got involved.
I pointed out that I had *already* bought Elements, and that they were not losing a customer (except they were gonna if this kept up because I have the power of cancelling my own transaction), and that I simply wanted to be a customer on a different level.
Five minutes later both sides of the party, the Twitter and the chat people, had made certain that my Creative Cloud membership was cancelled with no fees.
It would obviously have been better if I hadn’t had to go through *any* of that rigamarole, but I’m very pleased with their customer service, which provided me with what I wanted in a reasonably timely manner. And they’ve made it *far* more likely that I’ll straight-up buy any other Adobe products that I might want in the future, which is, you know. GOOD CUSTOMER SERVICE.
So good job, Adobe. You did this right.
Sadly, they only do the right thing because people are watching. If you’d *only* been using the phone support, they would have stuck to the €150 “cancellation fee”. But because you’re complaining about them on twitter, and you have an audience, they’re compelled to fix it. And I’m sure the difference between a blog post saying “bad job adobe” and this one is worth something to them.
I had a similar experience once with Aviva insurance, who made a complete mess of my claim until I wrote about the misery on Livejournal. I didn’t @ them in any way but I was found by a social media person and directed to someone who could actually fix the problem.
There is a *reason* I was livetweeting it, yes. But even livetweeting does not always get an acceptable response.