I can’t find any Ring staff contact to which I can direct feedback, so I hope it doesn’t get ignored here.
I switched to Ring last year (paid a hefty ETF to get out of a bad contract with another service). Frankly, I felt it was worth it, but my experience today leaves me wondering if I made an expensive mistake. Perhaps some Ring agent can see that this feedback gets to the right people. I’ll outline my feedback to make it easy.
1. How do you have no way of changing Ring Protect Pro billing frequency on the website?
I originally opted for the annual Ring Protect Pro plan, but a lot has changed in a year. December isn’t the best time of the year to have an extra $200 come out, especially when we also have both our car registrations due. So we decided we would switch to monthly for a few months, and maybe in spring or summer, switch back to annual. Easy, right?
Wrong. There’s no way to do that on the website. The only option you have is to cancel your plan (maybe change billing methods, but that wasn’t relevant). A quick google search, and lo and behold, there’s a Ring community post with a Ring agent who says to cancel your plan and reenable it. Okay, fine. A little janky, but I think I can handle this.
Except, then I had cancelled my Ring subscription with no way to reenable it. There’s no option on the website! It just tells you that you cancelled your subscription and it will end on…x and such date. Maybe it would have been different if I had opted to cancel immediately, but no one said to, so I didn’t think it would matter.
Looks like I’m calling support.
2. You can call support at 10pm, but not live chat?
The automated live chat was zero help. I just hoped it would connect me to a real person soon. It was 10pm. My husband was already asleep. Live chat would have been the best option for me, but I was only given phone options. Apparently, live chat is only available during certain hours. I can almost understand that, except it’s usually the other way around. Phone for limited hours and live chat 24 hours, but…okay.
At this point, my choices are wake up early to deal with this before work or call now, when I won’t forget about it, with my husband asleep in the other room of my tiny house. I’m not a morning person and, frankly, I will very likely forget. So I suck it up, call support, put on my flip flops and jacket and go outside to have this call in the cold rather than wake up my sleep-deprived husband.
To her credit, the rep on the other end of the phone was trying very hard to help me.
3. If the website can’t allow for this very easy, common billing operation, why is it so tough for customer support to make it happen?
I truly didn’t expect it to be so difficult to pull off something as (theoretically) simple as switching my billing plan. My tiny little chamber of commerce that I used to work for could pull it off with a fraction of the resources Ring has.
Yet, when I called, the rep informed me that my account was due to be canceled on a date in the future and that all I could do was log in after that date and resubscribe. No. I’m sorry. That’s just unacceptable. I do what I can to mitigate my memory issues, but reminders can only do so much. I do not want to have a lapse in memory AND monitoring, especially around the holidays!
I almost gave up on this. Figured somehow, a common billing request was too big an issue for a large company like Ring to handle. Started considering how I might sell off all my Ring products and see if SimpliSafe had better customer service.
But somehow, after, I dunno, the 4th time my rep asked her lead for help, they came up with a solution. I didn’t get to pick my billing date, but I guess beggars can’t be choosers. But, at least I could “Rest assured,” I would not have a lapse in coverage. Sorry, no matter how many times you say “rest assured,” I’m pretty troubled by how challenging this simple task was.
I’m troubled that a company that has existed for a decade somehow can’t handle this efficiently. This should have been a 5 minute phone call. Actually, it shouldn’t have been a phone call at all.
4. Where is the article in the Help Center?
The fact that I first got any information on how to make this switch from the community forum should say everything. It isn’t the first place I looked. I checked the Help Center. But search “Switch from yearly to monthly subscription” and…Nothing useful!
So I took to Google. The first few results were from the community. But I followed those instructions and ended up in a somehow bigger mess than if I’d just called them in the first place without cancelling, as instructed.
This is concerning. Clearly, I’m not the first to want to switch plans, as there’s community posts about it. Does Ring just not care enough about the needs of their customers? Can’t even be bothered to put an entry in the Help Center saying “Call customer support to make this switch”? Can’t add a note to the Ring Protect Pro cancellation page saying “want to switch billing cycles? Call customer support to request the change.”?
Is no one thinking about user experience at Ring?
Perhaps, when compared with other issues, this one doesn’t rank very high. My marketing background tells me that any stumbling block between your customer and paying you is a recipe for lost income, but maybe Ring knows something I don’t.
Bottom line: If you make it hard for me to give you money in the manner which works best for me, I’ll find a provider who doesn’t.