[masraum]

Originally Posted by David

First thing, if you have elderly parents and you're close to having to manage their finances, put your name on the account so your parents don't have to get involved with changes or service shut off.

I've spent hours on the phone recently to close accounts or downgrade service. The one thing all providers have in common is they make it really difficult to downgrade or discontinue. You must talk to a person to do it. But to upgrade it's just a click!

While some are using cheap labor outside the US, some are not. Considering every call I've made is pretty long, I can't imagine it's cost effective to pay a human to handle these tasks versus making it doable online.

BTW, I'm going on two months to shut down mom's internet account with Fidelity/Sparklight.

I'm sure that they force you to talk to a real human because I'll bet a big portion of the time the person gets talked out of cancelling and so the company keeps getting paid. That's how they afford having real people answer the phones and why they don't make cancelling just a click away. If it was easy, then folks would do it all of the time.