Canceling Stamps.com account

We use Pitney Bowes at work for stamp metering but my boss recently had the great idea of trying out stamps.com because he thought he’d be saving money. So I went ahead and signed up with them and gave it a try. Then his secretary called Pitney Bowes to close their account and they offered us an even better deal, so we decided to stay with them and cancel stamps.com.

So I went to the stamps.com site to find a link to cancel our account, with no luck. I finally found a page that told me to call a toll free number to cancel our account. Being that there was no way to do it on the site, I knew this wouldn’t be a pleasant process.

Upon calling the toll free number I was placed on hold for about 8 minutes. And then the classic outsourced Indian accent appeared on the phone. Not only that, the phone call even had a horrible echo, pretty much confirming that this was most likely being forwarded overseas.

So the operator first asks how he can assist me and I tell him that I want to cancel our account. He says, “I would like to help you with that” and starts asking the basics like my phone number, etc. Meanwhile, he keeps asking why we want to cancel and I say, “My boss decided we are staying with Pitney Bowes”. And again he says, “I would like to help you with the cancellation” but continues to ask more questions about how much we pay for Pitney Bowes, etc. Again I tell him that I’m not the decision maker here and just calling for my boss to cancel the account. And again he says, “I would like to help you with that”. But then he goes on to say that he can offer us a discounted rate if we would like to continue using stamps.com. At this point I was pretty pissed because I had been on the phone for over 15 minutes trying to cancel the account.

After repeating myself over and over again that I was in no position to make any decisions other than request cancellation of the account, he finally closed the account. I swear, these phone operators are complete automatons. Overall time wasted on the phone: 16 minutes. They could’ve made my life easier by just providing a damn on-line cancellation form with required fields for the questions they really wanted answers to.