why take the fun out of the trial?

April 18, 2007 by  

Free trials need good support too. Unfortunately, some companies think of every trial customer touch point as a chance to pressure for the sale. But the effect is to take all the fun out of the trial.

This has been my experience with XM radio. It was an unexpected bonus to see it built in my new car stereo with a 3 month trial. But every time I’d try to use it, I got 3 stations only, which were nothing more than advertising for XM. The section in the car manual was no help, neither was the XM website. I quickly became frustrated in that zone of “how the hell can I not know how to make this simple thing work?”. After a few miserable navigations through their voice system from hell, I got a support guy Sunday night at 11 p.m.

It went downhill from there. All I needed was a simple answer to my problem. Evidently, it takes 20 minutes the first time using XM to get all the stations in. Support guy made me jump through hoops, going out to the car, in the dark, in the nor’eastener, before I finally got the ‘answer’ out of him. I then realized he was just keeping me on the phone to pressure me about when I’d buy. And I still hadn’t tried it! And I felt like an even bigger fool for being led on! I told support guy that he just sealed the deal that I’ll never buy it because he took the fun out of it.

Toweling off, I thought of an old favorite book and quote by Tom Robbins.

tomrobbins.jpg

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