I do a weekly radio program on Blog Talk Radio. Blog Talk Radio is a service that provides a call in number and then does streaming audio over the Internet. They post to iTunes, tweet and update facebook for me. Overall I love the service and it’s free.

They also offer two levels of enhanced service. I signed up for the lower level enhanced service so I would be able to call my guests directly from the control panel. Unfortunately the service just didn’t work well. I emailed with and live chatted with customer service but they were just awful. There was no phone number to call and the service rep didn’t know what to do so she told to try contacting someone else but didn’t give me any information about who to contact. Then the function suddenly started working but the next time I logged in it did not work again.

So I hadn’t canceled the service yet as I really wanted the ability to conference people into the show but then I was billed and realized that since we hadn’t been able to get the functionality working it was time to cancel the premium service. Canceling the service was confusing. First I had to find where I could cancel the service. Then I hit the cancel button but did not receive any confirmation that the service was canceled, so I had to look around the site and I found something telling me that I had to notify BTL in writing that I was canceling. So I sent an email and asked for a refund. BTL responded to the email confirming that they canceled my service but had to refer me to another group for a refund. As of today 5 days after canceling I have not heard anything back from BTL.

Hmmm. They certainly are no Apple or even and Amazon. Good luck to BTL they’ll need it if they keep this type of customer service. I’ll continue to use the free service for now until I can find a better service else where.

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I recently signed up for both Mobile Me and Amazon’s Prime service. As it turns out I’m not continuing with either one of them. Mobile Me doesn’t work with Outlook when outlook is part of an exchange server, which makes it useless for my purposes. The Prime service I just don’t get enough benefit from to continue using it.

So Apple sends me an email yesterday saying I have seven days left on my free trial. In the email they tell me how much I’ll be billed, how to change my billing information and how to cancel if I wish. They obviously know they have a good service and assume most people will have a reason for leaving because the service does provide great value if you need it. It turns out I don’t need the service. I was able to cancel my account with no hassle what so ever and I even explained why I was canceling it when they asked because the process was made so easy.

Prime – I logged in to pay bills tonight and I see that my bank account is lower than it should be. Hmmm, I think to myself, Why is this? I look into the account details and what do I see, nothing but Prime staring back at me. No email warning, No this is how you cancel, No here is easy access to your account to cancel, No this is how much we’ll be charging your card in a few days nothing but a big fat hit to my account after the free trial ended. In my head Amazon is thinking “I know we can get at least on month hit out of this guy by charging him without warning. Maybe he’ll just cancel and not ask for his money back! HAHAHAHA” Okay well maybe that takes it a little far but you get the idea. I mean really how hard is it to tell your customers your going to bill them before you do? It creates such a better atmosphere of trust for the company and I can cancel if I really want to because maybe the service really wasn’t for me.

I’ve always loved Amazon and I think they are a great company. They are even one of the few affiliate programs I have advertised for in the past and still do on one of my other web sites, but I felt this Prime service they are offering is too expensive and maybe a little underhanded in how it’s marketed and then charged. The service is only valuable if you are ordering multiple times per month and unfortunately I just can’t afford to order that often.

I did call Amazon and received the service I expected. They removed the charge and took my suggestion to let people know before hand. I just hope they decide to act on it.

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