After my unexpected disconnection yesterday I just want to provide some feedback on what happened and how it could have been handled better.
On May 26 I sent a cancellation request for my service to be terminated at the end of June. I thought this was 6 months after sign-up but I was a month early (6 months would be at the end of August) and told support to just close the ticket and I would contact them closer to the time again.
On Jul 8 I received an email from WS asking me if I still wished to cancel my service at the end of August. At the time I had an open issue with my internet dying due to triggering their DDOS protections so I asked WS if I could let them know later depending on whether my issue was resolved (didn't want to cancel if the issue got fixed). That was on Jul 10 and received a response from WS saying that's all good.
Time went on and I got busy and never bothered following up further, the DDOS triggering issue was still open and I had just mitigated it for now by severely limiting the connection count on NNTP downloads (to a point where downloads are just unacceptably slow for a 1Gbps service).
I had just expected that seeing as I have never given any explicit instruction to cancel the line that it would just continue. I was just lazy and didn't feel like following up on the DDOS issue again.
Come Sunday Aug 1, my internet is dead. I first suspected it was an Octotel issue as we had just had a huge outage in Blouberg 2 days prior, so I contacted support and and eventually was told that my line was cancelled and released at midnight. I was offered assitance to re-activate the line with them as soon as possible but I decided that as my DDOS issue wasn't resolved I may as well just cut my losses and move on and try my luck with another ISP.
The biggest issue here was that I had no idea that my line was due to actually get cancelled. Sure I'm probably partly to blame here for not following up more diligently but this all could have been avoided by just being notified that my line was indeed getting cancelled. Just an automated mail scheduled a week in advance and another a day prior to the cancellation informing me that it's happening.
On a side I also find it very peculiar that there is no customer retention plan on cancellations - there was zero attempt to try and get me to stay. Maybe this is because I'm not considered to be worth it because I'm a relatively high usage customer, I don't know. While I appreciate that there is no friction when trying to cancel, I wouldn't be offended with a company trying to retain customers in a friendly non-obtrusive way.
@websquadza Thanks for all the assistance over the past 6 months, much appreciated.
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