Marketing From the Cottage

I signed up the online service of LogMeIn over a year ago when my wife and I were traveling overseas for a month. What I was able to do with it was leave a computer running at home with all my files and take my laptop so if I needed anything from my main computer I could access it.  Worked great, I used it a few times so it made it worth it.

I don’t use the service anymore and I saw a charge on my visa last month (how observant) for LogMeIn and thought, “Why haven’t I cancelled that service yet?” So I went into the website and logged into my account and looked for the “cancel my service” button. And looked. And looked. And then I remembered why I hadn’t cancelled my service yet. I had tried to cancel just after I got back (in the midst of the busyness of being back) but couldn’t find it and told myself that I would do it another day.

NOW OVER A YEAR LATER I’m back at it, trying to cancel my service.

So, in frustration, with no instructions on the website how to do it and no obvious “ways out” I called customer service. Sat through 15 minutes of, “Your call is important to us, please stay on the line and a… blah, blah.” Only to be affirmed that I was right, I couldn’t cancel the service myself, I spent another 10-15 minutes online with the representitive as he went through cancelling my account and submitting a refund request for the last charge to my VISA. I then asked for my call to be transferred to a manager to chat through this inconvenient service.

Now to their credit both representative and manager were the nicest, respectful, and apologetic people I’ve received on the customer service end and should be commended for that. My only gripe with the experience was not being offered back months of non use (on the goodwill side of things) and that they don’t allow an easy way to discontinue without having to sacrifice 30 minutes of your time to do so. That personal loss of time makes me not want to sign up with them again. If web services are “easy in” then they should be “easy out”. Or at least give solid instructions on how to get out instead of having to try to figure it out, get frustrated and call customer support and wonder if it is a sales call, a technical support call, or a billing call.

There is the simple philosophy in usuability, “If something is hard to use I just don’t use it as much.”

Well since starting to use this app I find that I am using it… alot! This iPhone app, CheckIt, from the company Thinking Code, is simple enough for “to do dumps” for quick access and yet I find it still also has the depth of some of the higher paid apps in it’s category. You can do multiple project task managements and organize things into thing needed to be dome today, week, and see which things are overdue. It seems to be as simple as you need it to be or as comprehensive (yet simple) as you need it to be.

If something is easy to use (like CheckIt) I will use it all the time…