As a user of Youtube music and Youtube Premium, I was pissed off. Here’s why..

Photo by Icons8 Team on Unsplash

Well, it’s not always happy, hopeful or inspiring stories. Sometimes stories are sad, expressing dissatisfaction, disappointment and anger.

I have been using youtube music for quite a while, I liked the service and how convenient it was. It comes as part of a package which is “Youtube Premium membership”. With youtube premium you can watch videos without advertising, listen to music, and you’re able to download videos and music to enjoy them without internet.

I was a happy customer, enjoying the service, until today when I wanted to report a problem to their customer support team.

What happened?

A while ago I wanted to cancel my membership, for a short duration and then reactivate it. While trying to do this from the app I saw a dialog that explained that I can pause my membership for some time.. just like in the image below.

Honestly, As a product owner I was impressed by their desire to retain the user and consider the fact that the user might just want to take a break.. I tapped pause out of curiosity to see what happens.. I saw a dialog just like the one below..

Aha, that’s very good, that’s exactly what I needed. Retaining everything for the time when my membership is resumed, then I have my playlists and downloads. Fantastic, I’m a happy customer! .. And then I tapped this blue button.

BUT it isn’t all romantic, is it?

No, when the time came and my membership got renewed automatically, I tried to access my playlists, they are there, cool.. but when I tried to listen to my downloads, I was shocked by the fact that there’s an exclamation icon on all of them, indicating that there’s a problem. I tried to play multiple tracks, but it always showed the error dialog below

BTW, it was not even a video!

Okay, that’s annoying.. there must be a problem.. I tried and tried but no hope..

So, I decided to contact the customer support

Truth be told, I still had hope that my problem would be solved, but after contacting the customer support I lost that hope totally. Here’s the chat..

I meant “can” instead of “kan”..

Translation: Dear user, if you wanna fuck off we totally respect that. We might also appreciate it, we’re a big company that doesn’t need happy customers.

Should I comment?

Honestly, I didn’t want to comment, Probably because I think they might not listen, but this is the last hope that they might listen, and more importantly it has lessons learned for me and fellow product owners..

1. Again, don’t promise what your product doesn’t deliver!
2. Subscriptions are tricky, you’ve got to pay attention to what people are paying for
3. Fix such stupid bugs like this one as soon as you discover them, especially if you are a huge company with hundreds or thousand of engineers
4. For god sake, train your customer support people (or maybe bots) to have empathy and to go the extra mile in helping the customer.. fake bullshit doesn’t help.. Dear customer, go fuck yourself doesn’t help.. dear customer, feel free to try other alternatives doesn’t fucking help.. Amazon customer support teams are really much better in terms of trying to fix the problem for the user and going the extra mile to replace anger with a delightful experience of customer appreciation.

All said, what happened turned a very happy customer spreading the word about the convenient service into an angry customer who would keep telling the story of how a big company fucked up the user experience that much.

It’s sad to see that what started as an amazing customer retention idea ended up pissing the customer off. Youtube premium, you failed me really badly!!