Recently, my mother-in-law wanted to put on Disney+ for her grandkids so they could watch one of their favorite shows. But when she opened the app, she realized she had been logged out.
She tried signing back in, but the subscription she had been paying for was suddenly no longer accessible.
So, we stepped in to help.
Years ago, when she signed up for Verizon Fios, she received a promotion that included Disney+, Hulu, and ESPN+ for one low monthly price. It was a great deal and one of those added benefits that made staying with the provider feel worthwhile.
Over time, streaming prices changed. Packages changed. The relationships between streaming services and cable companies changed. Her account did not change with them.
Verizon still showed the bundle as active and continued billing her for it, but she could no longer access Disney+.
That’s when a subscription problem became a customer experience problem.
The Customer Shouldn’t Discover the Problem First
There was no clear communication telling her that the package was changing, that she needed to take action, or that access to one of the services was about to stop.
She found out when she tried to use it.
And if we had not stepped in to help, she might not have known where to begin.
That raises a basic customer experience question:
If a company knows a customer’s subscription is changing, why is the customer discovering it only after the service stops working?
Companies have this information and know which plan a customer has. They know what the customer is paying for, which packages are being discontinued, migrated, or replaced.
Customers should not have to discover that something they are still paying for no longer works.
And companies should not assume every customer will understand how to troubleshoot a complicated relationship between a cable provider and a streaming platform.
Don’t Make the Customer Navigate Your Partnerships
We started making calls on her behalf.
That turned into conversations with both Verizon and Disney+.
Each company seemed to understand one part of the problem, but neither could completely resolve it. We spent almost three hours trying to figure out what had happened, including approximately one hour of being put on hold.
Eventually, the answer was essentially this: remove the old promotion and enroll in the new offering.
The new package was cheaper, but there was just one significant difference.
It included ads.
From the company’s perspective, that may have looked like a reasonable replacement. From my mother-in-law’s perspective, it was not the service she had been paying for.
That difference is important.
Customers do not care which company controls the billing platform, authentication system, account linking, subscription entitlement, or backend integration.
And they should not have to.
She paid Verizon for access to a bundle that included Disney+. Verizon continued billing her and showed the subscription as active.
Yet Disney+ was inaccessible, and that was the problem.
Customers shouldn’t become project managers between two companies trying to determine who is responsible for fixing their account.
When companies create partnerships, the complexity of those partnerships should stay behind the scenes.
If the customer pays one company for access to another company’s service, there should be a clear process for resolving problems when that connection breaks.
Consider the Customer Who Doesn’t Have Someone to Help
This experience also made us think about another part of the customer journey that companies sometimes overlook:
What happens to the customer who doesn’t have someone willing or able to spend hours helping them?
For someone comfortable with apps, streaming services, online accounts, and subscription management, troubleshooting an issue like this is frustrating.
For an older customer who may not understand why Verizon says a subscription is active while Disney+ says it is not, it can become overwhelming very quickly.
My mother-in-law had been a Verizon customer for approximately 25 years.
A customer with that kind of tenure should not need a family member to investigate the problem, call multiple companies, understand the differences between subscription packages, and eventually figure out how to escalate the complaint.
Accessibility in customer experience isn’t only about font sizes, websites, or disability accommodations.
It is also about how easy your company makes it for an ordinary customer to get help when something goes wrong.
If your support process requires customers to understand your internal systems in order to get a resolution, the process is not working.
Frontline Employees Need More Than One Option
The biggest problem was not that the original package had changed.
Customers understand that products change, promotions end, and prices increase.
The problem was that the employees we spoke with did not seem to have any meaningful options beyond telling us to cancel her existing package and accept the new one.
That is not really a resolution. It is a system limitation being passed along to the customer.
Eventually, we submitted a formal complaint.
That is when someone from Verizon’s executive office contacted us. They were surprised the situation had not been resolved through the regular billing and customer service channels.
We were too, and that reveals a much larger customer experience problem.
An executive escalation shouldn’t be necessary to solve a problem that a properly equipped frontline employee could have handled.
When an executive office can recognize that something does not make sense, but frontline employees have no authority or process to fix it, the organization has created an unnecessary escalation gap.
The customer sees one problem, and behind that problem may be a policy issue, an employee enablement issue, a technology limitation, a partner-management issue, or a broken escalation process.
The customer should not have to figure out which one it is.
How Subscription Companies Can Handle These Situations Better
The good news is that none of these problems are impossible to address. Companies offering bundled subscription services can create a much better experience by designing for what happens when packages, partnerships, and technology change.
1. Communicate Before Access Changes
If a legacy subscription is being discontinued, migrated, or changed, customers should hear about it before anything stops working.
Tell them what is changing, when it is changing, how it affects their current service, and what they need to do.
Better yet, when possible, handle the migration for them.
Customers should not learn about a subscription change from an unexpected login screen.
2. Create a Real Migration Path for Grandfathered Customers
Legacy customers should not automatically be treated like new subscribers.
If the exact product can no longer be supported, companies should have transition options that account for what the customer previously received.
If someone had an ad-free service, for example, replacing it with an ad-supported version may technically provide access to the same streaming platform.
This solution does not provide the same experience.
Companies should acknowledge that difference and determine how they are going to make the customer whole.
3. Make One Company Responsible for the Resolution
When multiple companies are involved, customers should not have to determine who owns the problem.
If a customer is paying you for the service, your organization should take responsibility for helping resolve it.
That may mean coordinating with the partner behind the scenes.
What it should not mean is telling the customer to call another company, only for that company to send them back to you.
4. Give Frontline Employees Meaningful Options
Customer service representatives need more than one path for handling unusual situations.
That could include access to a specialized subscription team, account migration support, credits, equivalent packages, retention options, or an internal escalation path where someone actually takes ownership of the issue.
The goal should not be to force every customer into the easiest option available in the system.
The goal should be to find the closest reasonable solution to what the customer was promised.
5. Design Support for Customers Who Need More Help
Companies should test customer journeys with more than their most digitally confident customers in mind.
Could an older customer understand what happened?
Would they know who to call?
Could they explain the problem?
Would your representative understand it?
And could that representative actually fix it?
If the answer to any of those questions is no, there is an opportunity to improve the experience.
6. Recognize the Relationship, Not Just the Transaction
A customer of approximately 25 years should not have to reach an executive office before the length of that relationship becomes relevant.
Customer tenure, account history, previous issues, and loyalty should be visible when employees are making service recovery decisions.
Companies spend enormous amounts of money acquiring customers, and they should put just as much thought into the systems designed to keep them.
The Bigger CX Lesson
Subscription businesses will continue to change.
Streaming prices will increase, and bundles will disappear. Partnerships will change, and technology will be replaced.
Customers do not expect every promotion to last forever.
They do expect companies to manage those changes without making them absorb all of the inconvenience.
And they should not need a family member who understands customer experience, knows how to escalate complaints, and is willing to spend hours on the phone just to get someone to look at the problem.
A good customer experience does not mean nothing ever goes wrong.
It means the company has designed a clear path for what happens when something does.
Because when a grandmother who has been a customer for approximately 25 years loses access to a service she is still paying for, her family spends hours talking to multiple companies, and the issue eventually requires executive-level involvement, the problem is not just the subscription.
It’s the customer journey.
