Originally Posted by
k14
I would be interested to hear people's thoughts on my experience with Sky last week. I am a shareholder (smallish holding) but around 15% of my portfolio. If there are other customers experiencing this boneheaded service then I have some concerns going forward.
I subscribed back up to Sky Sport Now back in June and have been happily watching it since. Been working great till last Thursday night, tried to watch some golf highlights and I got an error message saying my account couldn't access that content. So jumped on my PC and logged into my account. It showed my account was inactive and after looking around a bit more I saw that three credit card transactions had failed to go through. The first on 10th September (renewal date) and then two more on the 14th and 16th with my account cancelled on the third failure. Silly me, I forgot I had been sent a new card from my bank in August so updated the details online and thought the account would reactivate. Nope, had to resubscribe at the full rate of $39 a month compared to the deal I had of $25 a month for 12 months. I went through my email and spam, no emails at all from Sky to tell me of the first failed payment on the 10th. Sent the helpdesk an email, they said basically "You let your account expire, deal can't be renewed you can re-sign up for the advertised price". I replied and got a similarly blunt response, I thought the tone of the emails were also pretty telling of a company with low employee engagement.
So, now Sky have lost a customer. Just cannot fathom the stupidity of their system that doesn't notify a user that the payment has failed. I kept using the account for a week after it failed and never was notified. I would have happily paid the monthly fee which included the week I used it. Now I am reconsidering the subscription and probably just go without till another deal comes along.
I find it hard to believe this is a one off event. The amount of users in a similar boat to me on both Sky Sport Now and Neon must be pretty high. Credit cards usually have a life of 3 years I think? So divide the number of users on these platforms by 36 and you can see how many they risk loosing every month when the credit card details lapse. No wonder the ship is sinking if they treat all customers like this!