Forcibly Subscribed to Premiere A Week Before Trial Ends

[InvisibleHat]

I’ve been a Basic subscriber for a number of years now and have also been beta testing the iOS app. A few weeks ago I got a TestFlight notification that there was an update and, after installing it, I futzed around in the app a bit and agreed to the Premiere Trial.

Later, I was notified via email that this "Trial" would end on the 10th of June, after which I would be auto-enrolled in Premier. Signing up for the "Trial" gave no indication that one would be auto-enrolled in anything. Had auto-enrollment been announced as a condition for testing out additional services, I would never have clicked on the button.

Last week, I realized I hadn’t used any of the Premier services even once so I logged in to cancel the "Trial". To my surprise, annoyance and concern, I discovered that it was impossible to opt-out or cancel the "Trial" enrollment from my Services pane. Clicking "Change Subscription" merely causes a drop down context menu to appear that says you have to call the company to cancel the "Trial" before being forcibly enrolled in Premier.

Today, while paying my normal monthly bills, I again checked the Services pane hoping to find that this major oversight in functionality, the inability to unenroll in a trial, had been corrected. It had not. I contacted the company via chat.

The first chatbot I got kept asking me if I was "Still there?" immediately after my sent responses. She disconnected the chat before I could be unenrolled.

I went through the form AGAIN and got a friendlier chatbot. This chatbot informed me that I was not in the Premier Trial I agreed to test out and which was supposed to still have a week of trial service left, but that I had somehow been subscribed, without my knowledge or consent, to the regular Premier service. Every time I asked her how this could have happened, she responded with auto-messages saying I had to call the company for answers to that question. I had to repeatedly state that I wanted to return to my regular Basic service in order to get that change to occur and she refused to state explicitly that I was not going to be charged for however long I had been fraudulently subscribed to Premier.

This is unacceptable, amongst other things.

I have recommended you guys to people for YEARS. I would absolutely not recommend anyone else get involved with a company so shady that they change your account services without customer knowledge or consent, intentionally prevent the customer from being able to cancel and change his/her own services, bait-and-switch and make dealing with "customer service" to correct all the problems the unethical UI and system configurations cause an aggravating, repetitive, unpleasant time suck.

Whoever had the "great idea" to (illegally?) force a previously content and loyal customer base into more expensive subscriptions they have to jump through hoops to get out of should be fired and probably investigated. These are terrible business decisions. And I’m very disappointed that, after years of a headache-free business relationship, I no longer feel that I can trust Ooma with my credit card information.

[Tom]

The 30-day premier trial you signed up for on 4/16 through the mobile app to enable inbound calling is opt-in, meaning if you so choose you need to cancel continued premier service before the trial ends. At https://my.ooma.com/account/services# you would have seen: 'Subscription begins in x days. Opt out of Ooma Premier.'

When you logged into MyOoma last week the trial had already ended so the opt-out link was no longer available. Agreed that the app language could be improved. Currently it says 'To enable inbound calling to the mobile app, you must be an Ooma Premier
subscriber. Would you like to sign-up for a 30-day free trial?'.

The trial when you start your telo service is generally opt-out. At MyOoma it will say 'Trial ends in x days. Subscribe to Ooma Premier'.