Sirius v. Audible: Two Customer Retention Programs
I’ve recently stopped using both Sirius satellite radio and Audible.com, two very different services, but with similar pricing models: monthly. These types of businesses live and breath on their subscribers. Where they differ even more than technology, is their customer retention programs.
Sirius
Last year, I purchased a lightly used 2008 Ford Escape Limited. I couldn’t be happier with my purchase of this vehicle, and I’m not surprised that Ford might live through this downturn and arise stronger on the upswing. One sweet perk was that I got a six month free trial of Sirius satellite radio.
I was pretty underwhelmed after hearing all the hoopla about Sirius. My first observation was that I had missed the days of satellite radio with real selection. Clearly the playlists have been consolidated into the same shit as terrestrial radio, and on talk stations, there are just as many if not more ads as the FM dial.
Although I did enjoy the ultra-right-wing political rants on FOX and Patriot 101 (really, its high entertainment), I wasn’t satisfied with my buck-bang. So when my beloved Republican Crazies when silent one day, I called up Sirius to negotiate.
Sirius: Thank you for holding, this is Lola. How can I help you?
Jambrose: Hi! My 6-month trial is done. How can I get this going again?
Sirius: That will be $15.00 per month on your credit card, Sir.
Jambrose: Gulp. Really? Wow. That’s a lot. I don’t see that happening.
Sirius: Silence.
Jambrose: I mean, I like a couple channels only. Can we make a deal here?
Sirius: It’s $15.00 per month, Sir.
Jambrose: Yeah, but c’mon. Tell you what, you can charge my card right now, one year for $100. Whadaya say?
Sirius: It’s $15.00 per month, Sir.
Jambrose: So I can’t get a better deal?
Sirius: Sorry, it’s $15.00 per month, Sir.
Jambrose: Ok, then. Thanks. I’ll go ahead and not get that.
Sirius: Is there anything else I can do for you today, Sir?
Jambrose: Uh… No. That’s plenty, thanks.
Sirius: Thank you for calling Sirius and have a nice day.
The kicker is that when I initiated the trial, they got my email address. Over the course of the 6 months, and ever since, I’ve never received an email from Sirius. Surely, the “primary person responsible solely for the winning back of any and all lost customers, as well as the non-converted trial customers via the online media player and Automotive trial subscriptions” is now unemployed (if he ever existed). I wonder if this keen new hire will be calling me?
Audible
My deal with Audible was typical: I pay a reasonable amount monthly, and I get to download one book per month. There is nothing wrong with Audible, but after a couple months, I found I didn’t have enough time to actually listen to my books. I did find the ass-pain of putting the books on my Blackberry annoying, but I made it work. I’ll save my “DRM is Stupid” blog post for less topic-saturated times.
Via the Audible website, I chose to close my account. Here’s how that went:
Jambrose: I’m done, close my account.
Audible: Are you sure? Check out all these new books you are sure to like!
Jambrose: Nah, close my account.
Audible: Ok, I hear you. Maybe we can change your mind with a $20 gift voucher?
Jambrose: No thanks, it’s not the price. Close my account.
Audible: Hey. We get it. Maybe you don’t have a lot of time of listen to books. What if we just put your account on hold for the next three months? No charge. We’ll send you a reminder, and you can decide then if you really want to quit. In the meantime, have a free download.
Jambrose: Well… That makes sense. Let’s do that.
Customer retained. At least for now.
That was less than three months ago, but I get email from Audible once per week, telling me about new books, new site features, higher quality recordings, etc… I’ll be more than happy to give it another go when my account is reactivated.
I’m curious to see how it will play out when I quit again though…
What a whiny bitch this guy is?!!…This is same “high Value” customer that pits his cable service provider against his Satellite provider to see who will give him more free service…get a life?
Johnny,
Thanks for your thoughtful comment. In case you are unfamiliar with the services discussed in the article above, Sirius is satellite radio, and the other is an audio book service. Neither are television service providers, and they don’t compete.
Would you not agree that something is better than nothing for a struggling company? Clearly I am not the only person who thinks that Sirius is over priced, and all they have done since buying the only competition (XM) is to raise prices. These rates are even higher in Canada.
My last point is that you should review the title of this post. This is a comparison of two customer RETENTION programs. Sirius clearly has no retention program whatsoever, and even they have acknowledged the need for a dedicated retention resource. Hopefully this new hire will read my post, and update the billing support script for operators. Like this classic:
Sirius is 12.95 per month. You can pay monthly, quarterly, semi annually, yearly, 2 year etc.
Monthly – 12.95
Quarterly – 38.85
Semi Annual 0 77.10
Yearly – 142.45 (Saving 1 month of service)
2 year – 245.00 (Saving 5 months of service)
All these prices are for sirius everything. I would never go 3 year as a LIFETIME is actually cheaper. You can get the lifetime for 399.99 and break it down into 5 payments of 79.99.
You can also choose family friendly, mostly music, and news talk and entertainment. They will run from 6.99 per month to 9.99 per month.
If you have a Starmate 5 you can go on an al la carte plan which lets you pick and choose your channels.
I would recommend paying the 12.95 per month as you get everything. Give it a chance, I started out listening to a few channels too. Once I got into it and checked the other stations out it is really quite amazing. I have 30 presets with my sportster and everyone is used up. Check out :
Jason Ellis on Faction (3pm est)
Raw Dogg Comedy
Laughs USA
Howard Stern
Playboy
Cosmo
Octane
and all the other talk stations.
I hated talk stations, but listening to these station actually make me want to call in and contribute. Go with a monthly plan and test it for a month or two. Give it a real chance and you will think it is worth the cost.
Hope that helps.
Also, SIRIUS US and SIRIUS Canada are two seperate companies. Sirius US owns only 10% of SIRIUS Canada. SIRIUS Canada is privately owned. The reason the price is higher at $14.99 per month is because they dont have the same customer base. There are about 13 million subscribers in the US and only about 1 or less in canada.
If you have any questions about the service please feel free to ask. I work for SIRIUS retention team but I am more of a customer than I am an employee.
Regards,
Matt
By the way, is that Dell video an actual call. It is hilarious but disturbing that he is a customer service rep. Again, any questions that you may have please feel free to ask.
@Matt Thanks for commenting! I appreciate you identifying yourself as an employee of Sirius. Hopefully Sirius Canada also gets around to hiring retention people like yourself.
One major issue that I think you have exposed here is that Sirius has all of this information, but does not ensure that it gets to the front-line operators.
Support scripts, proper training and call monitoring are worth their weight in gold. “Your call may be monitored for quality assurance purposes”. This is precisely the type of thing that should be monitored and incrementally improved. I still think $15 bucks a month is too much, though…
Image: Matt at Sirius USA Social Media Brand Monitoring Command Centre
Depending on the call center you get the better customer service you get. This can be partly blamed on SIRIUS but that is how the call center service works. They are contracted out. I am in a Canadian Call Center. There are three within Canada. We serve SIRIUS US though as the contracts are contracted out.
If you get an agent from another country, their customer service is lacking, mainly due to the scripts. I can say that we run on little to no scripts. There are things that we have to say, but compared to other contracts I have worked on such as Microsoft and Dell, it is very minimal. However, I am assuming because of the language barrier, they run on scripts.
We have to verify the account and ask for the email, we must read a verbatim statement when signing a customer up to let them know we work on automatic renewals, and we must say SIRIUS at the end of the call. That is as far as the script goes. There is no written script for anything, except for the verbatim statement.
I have heard many customer say they hang up until they get someone from Canada. As it goes, all contracts have customer service agents from other countries, and myself, I find it very frustrating. If you reach someone from Canada, I can guarantee you all of the information you want is readily available.
Sorry for the earful. Again, anything about the service you need to know, please ask me. Not sure if my contract allows it but its our little secret. We will consider it overtime;)
Regards,
Matt
Also, it really get me going when people hate SIRIUS because of the customer service. If all the call center contracts were in Canada or the US there would be no issues. However, since the contracts must go to the lowest bidder by law, there is nothing that we can do. Very unfortunate. If I had a business, which I will soon, the interview process would be much more in depth as many customers cancel because of the customer service they have.
When I hear people like yourself having a bad experience, it makes me angry because I really do enjoy the service.
Nice pic by the way. If that is the way it was prices would be cheaper;)
Again, another note. The three call centers in Canada compete with each other for Quality. Whatever call center has the best quality they get prizes, BBQ, gift certificates, and other incentives. I think this really helps and you are correct, proper training should be given to agents in other countries.
@Matt I started my career in a Compaq call centre in Ottawa, Ontario. We only served the US queue.
Everyone got the same training: three weeks of product and customer care training. We listen to live calls, covered scenarios, when to escalate, etc… Our call centre got awards, but I also worked with guys who would hang up mid-sentence to make it seem like they were acciden
Yah I am sure they are everywhere unfortunately. We get the same training, except with SIRIUS it is 95% customer service as our tools are very easy to use. I think speaking proper English allows for better customer service and you don’t have to rely on scripts.
I have worked for SIRIUS for about a year, with my customer service experiance of about 7 years I do pretty well and I like making people happy. I see people with 10-15 supervisor calls a day. Since I started, I didn’t have one! There is no need for a customer to speak to a supervisor when you know more than they do. Supervisor do schedules and keep tabs on you. If you need permission to actually do something, they say go ahead and you put it through. So they do nothing to help you. As a customer service rep you have the power to make a customer happy, which is all they want really.
I have spoken to many upset customer where the first thing I hear is “Manager”. But, they never do get to speak to one as I make the happy before it gets to that point.
Update: I just got an email from Audible:
This is a great system. I think I will be going for a book (if I can get it to work with my Blackberry).
I just called today to cancel because of the music royalties fee on top of the $2 per additional radio raise back in march. The CSR was very helpful and set me up with 5 months of Sirius everything for $20 per radio. So I set up all three of my radios on this plan
Jason