SiriusXM Sued Over ‘Burdensome’ Cancellation Process by NY AG

A new lawsuit accuses SiriusXM of making it too hard for customers to cancel subscriptions.

The suit, filed against the satellite radio service Wednesday (Dec. 20) by the New York attorney general, said SiriusXM maintains a “deliberately long and burdensome” cancellation process.

According to a news release, the attorney general’s investigation found that the company “forces its subscribers to call or chat online with an agent” to cancel subscriptions and deliberately draws out those interactions to keep subscribers from canceling.

“Having to endure a lengthy and frustrating process to cancel a subscription is a stressful burden no one looks forward to, and when companies make it hard to cancel subscriptions, it’s illegal,” said Attorney General Letitia James.

“Consumers should be able to cancel a subscription they no longer use or need without any issues, and companies have a legal duty to make their cancellation process easy.”

The lawsuit seeks restitution, penalties, and disgorgement from SiriusXM for violating New York’s business laws.

“It’s telling that the New York Attorney General issued a press release before providing SiriusXM with a copy of the complaint,” a spokesperson for the company said in a statement to PYMNTS.

“Like a number of consumer businesses, we offer a variety of options for customers to sign up for or cancel their SiriusXM subscription and, upon receiving and reviewing the complaint, we intend to vigorously defend against these baseless allegations that grossly mischaracterize SiriusXM’s practices.”

According to SiriusXM, those “mischaracterizations” include the fact that the investigation is based on findings from 2020, when the company’s customer services efforts were hindered by the effects of the COVID pandemic. By 2021, the company said, the average online chat response to consumer messages was between 36 seconds and 2.4 minutes.

Meanwhile, past reporting by PYMNTS has shown that merchants who make it easy for users to cancel subscriptions can actually retain customers.

Alex Brown, CEO of subscription cleaning supplies provider Truly Free, told PYMNTS’ Karen Webster during a round table earlier this year that his company lets subscribers cancel services themselves directly from the membership portal.

The result, he said, was “less cancellation requests, more saves and less customer service time. That’s given us the latitude to take a little bit of the pressure off of them, and I think it’s caused more of them to come back in the future too.”