Thursday, December 17, 2015
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Friday, March 20, 2015
Sunday, March 1, 2015
Cancelling services
I'm addicted to podcasts. One of my favorites is Freakonomics. I was listening to this one this morning and found it to be fascinating: http://freakonomics.com/2015/02/26/the-maddest-men-of-all-a-new-freakonomics-radio-podcast/ Basically, it tells how companies are using behavioral economics to manipulate people.
The story starts off in a call center for a UK newspaper company. The staff are trained with these techniques which often result in people not cancelling.
In the real world, cancelling can be miserable. This audio clip went viral a few months ago when a dude tried to cancel his Comcast service: https://soundcloud.com/ryan-block-10/comcastic-service. It's pretty awesome.
I recently switched internet providers, from Comcast to Time Warner. When I called up Comcast, I didn't have the energy to battle for 20 minutes, so I adopted a new technique.
So, hypothetically speaking, if you ever need to cancel a service like Comcast, if you hypothetically tell them that you're moving out of the country tomorrow and you need your service disconnected, a 20 minute call from hell is magically transformed into a 30 second "have fun abroad" conversation.
In your face, behavioral economics.
If you think I'm a horrible person, listen to https://soundcloud.com/ryan-block-10/comcastic-service.
By the way, 2 meg/s download + 1 meg/s upload has worked remarkably well. It does streaming pretty well. It does VOIP well. What it fails to do well is multitasking (streaming + voip). It's definitely something I can live with for $15/month (https://www.timewarnercable.com/en/plans-packages/internet/internet-service-plans.html).
The story starts off in a call center for a UK newspaper company. The staff are trained with these techniques which often result in people not cancelling.
In the real world, cancelling can be miserable. This audio clip went viral a few months ago when a dude tried to cancel his Comcast service: https://soundcloud.com/ryan-block-10/comcastic-service. It's pretty awesome.
I recently switched internet providers, from Comcast to Time Warner. When I called up Comcast, I didn't have the energy to battle for 20 minutes, so I adopted a new technique.
So, hypothetically speaking, if you ever need to cancel a service like Comcast, if you hypothetically tell them that you're moving out of the country tomorrow and you need your service disconnected, a 20 minute call from hell is magically transformed into a 30 second "have fun abroad" conversation.
In your face, behavioral economics.
If you think I'm a horrible person, listen to https://soundcloud.com/ryan-block-10/comcastic-service.
By the way, 2 meg/s download + 1 meg/s upload has worked remarkably well. It does streaming pretty well. It does VOIP well. What it fails to do well is multitasking (streaming + voip). It's definitely something I can live with for $15/month (https://www.timewarnercable.com/en/plans-packages/internet/internet-service-plans.html).
Thursday, February 26, 2015
Sunday, February 15, 2015
Thursday, February 12, 2015
Wednesday, February 11, 2015
Friday, January 16, 2015
Wednesday, January 7, 2015
Tuesday, January 6, 2015
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