How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Closing My Account

So, I recently had to open an account with Stamps.com because eBay is retarded and made a shipping service (Parcel Select) that's only available for commercial shipments an option for sellers. Of course, I only discovered this once my auctions had ended and the buyers had paid the shipping rate for a service eBay/PayPal did not actually provide online labels for. My only option was to open an account with Stamps.com and use their services to print my shipping labels.

Stamps.com offers a free trial account for a month with a free $5 account credit, and they send you a free "starter kit" with S&H supplies. However, once the month is up, they start to charge you a monthly fee ($9.99 and up). While it had been easy enough to use their service and print my labels, and I appreciated having the option, I had no intention of keeping my account open, as I always use eBay/PayPal's shipping services for my auctions (when they actually provide them for the shipping options they make available for auctioned items).

Also, I'm poor.

Needless to say, while I knew I had to close my Stamps.com account prior to the end of my 30-day trial period in order to avoid fees for a service I was not going to be using, I dreaded having to call and listen to a needling account representative repeatedly try to press me into keeping my account open, or offering special bonuses or rates to keep me on as a valued customer. It's like when you call to close your credit card account and they transfer you to a "specialist" whose only job is to question your reasons for closing the account and use specially designed psychological tactics to pressure or guilt you into keeping your account open.

I'm not hating on these people, I truly feel sorry for them, and admire them in a strange way because I could never, in a million years, do what they do. I'm a very non-confrontational, go-with-the-flow kinda person. Naturally, if I worked as an account closure "specialist", my first call would be from a blustery middle-aged guy with a New York accent demanding that his account be closed "rightfrigginnow", and my immediate response would be, "Absolutely, sir. Say no more. Your account will be closed before you can say pickled Piccadilly pimpernel." And my superiors would review the call (because it would, of course, be recorded for quality and training purposes), and they'd furiously summon me into their office and demand to know why I didn't advance the customer's case to the "kittens will die a fiery death if you close your account" level. I'd be fired after less than a week, and that would be the end of my illustrious call center career.

All this being said, I still knew I had to get my account closed, so tonight I slowly, reluctantly, dreadingly dialed the 1-888 number listed on the Stamps.com web site for account closures. I listened to the prompts and was surprised to hear that there was actually an option specifically for closing Stamps.com accounts. There's almost never a phone option to close your account, nor is there any mention of how to do so on the company's web site. It's like they think if they don't mention closing your account anywhere EVER, the notion to do so will never enter your mind, or you'll simply accept that closing your account is not, in fact, an option, nor will it be. EVER.

So, I press the number for the account closing option and waited to be redirected to a "specialist" who would proceed to wheel and deal and poke and plead while I squirmed on the other end of the line, trying to formulate the most firm and decisive response along the lines of NO that I could muster (since NO typically fails to work the first 27 times I say it).

Gulping down deep breaths, I cringe as a voice comes on the line, introducing themselves as Jessica, an automated assitan-whaaaaaaa-??? "Automated assistant"!?!? You mean... I don't have to sit through an agonizing fifteen minutes of pleading and "limited-time bonus offers" to ask you to do the same thing I asked you to do before you wasted fifteen minutes of my time and yours? Nope. All I had to do was hear two recorded 15-second extended trial offers, press 2 twice to say, "No thanks, I'd still like to close my account," and then listen to Jessica tell me she was sorry I was leaving, but she would close my account and send me a confirmation email within the next two days. Jessica ended the call with a friendly "goodbye" and, without further ado, hung up on me like the piddly, forty-nine-dollars-and-sixty-seven-cents-worth-of-business customer that I was.

I put my phone down, shocked, relieved, and actually quite impressed at the ease and efficiency with which I had just been able to close my unwanted account. I mean, granted, the easiest and most ideal method would have been to simply close it on online, the same way I'd created it, but if I had to make a phone call, by golly that was the easiest account-closingest phone call I'd ever had the pleasure of making. Kudos to you, Stamps.com, for being a step above all those other companies out there that threaten to kill cute baby animals unless you continue to do business with them. You turned what could have been a very awkward and cringe-worthy phone call into an easy breezy and, yes, even pleasant exchange. eBay/PayPal could stand to take a page from your book. Color me impressed.