I was rounding up invoices for the accountant today, and realized that I am still on a couple of premium plans I thought I had cancelled. LinkedIn was one of them.
I was really sure I had sent them the cancellation request, as I had only upgraded to manage a specific project, which ended more than a month ago. Unable to find my request, I went looking through their site to figure out how to downgrade.
Here is their amazing list of instructions for downgrading. Draw your own conclusions, but for me, this does nothing for their brand, and will make me even more cautious about upgrading in the future.
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Downgrade your Premium Subscription
How do I cancel or downgrade my current premium subscription account?
A
request to cancel your premium subscription switches your account to a
free personal account. Cancellation will end billing and remove access
to the premium features designed for premium subscriptions.
A request to downgrade
your premium subscription changes your account to a lower lever premium
subscription while still offering features like InMails and expanded
people search. Changes will be made effective with the billing
expiration date of your current subscription.
To downgrade
to a lower premium subscription level or to cancel your premium account
and switch to a free personal account, follow the steps below:
- Click on 'Account & Settings' found in the upper right hand side of the home page.
- Click on 'Compare Account Types' and identify the account type that best fits your needs.
- Click on 'Customer Service' link found at the bottom of the page.
- Click on 'Ask Customer Service' tab on the 'Customer Service Center' page.
- Enter your account's primary email address in 'Contact Information'.
- Select 'Premium Accounts' from the 'Category' dropdown under 'My question is about'.
- In the 'Subject' type 'Downgrade My Subscription' (if you want a lower level premium subscription) or 'Cancel My Subscription' (if you want to just keep the free personal account).
- In the 'Question' text box, identify what type of account you want to end up through this request. For example, "I would like to move to change to Business Plus account" or "I only want a free personal account."
- Click on 'Continue'.
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Nine steps. Remarkable. So I have now sent a new request via their request function. Look at the confirmation screen reproduced below:
So the instructions are not quite correct, actually. You might think this is just a boiler-plate confirmation screen and not read it. But there is one more step. If you are seduced into clicking on a link that has "answers", your response would not be submitted at all, you'd be in an infinite loop of some kind.
After you click "finish submitting question" you finally get this confirmation. And then a confirmation e-mail. That confirmation e-mail was the first positive about this process, in my view.
Quite apart from canceling, you might want to be able to produce an invoice to support the credit card charge. [Accountants, you know, they have their rules. And so does the tax man] See if you can locate the link that shows where you find the invoice for prior charges.
Having trouble? I know I did. But it's tucked up there in small type below the line that tells you what kind of account you have.
Incredibly, the company has already responded to my request to back-date the downgrade and refund one month. So they did really well on the service recovery front. But created some unnecessary work for themselves in the process.
LinkedIn is surely not evil. But this process and the visual design supporting it is awful. And they are not the only ones out there pulling this kind of nonsense.
I just hope there isn't some customer experience expert out there recommending this approach.
