Why am i not able to cancel my directv stream service?

The purposely want you to call so they can try to change your mind. It's been this way forever. 

In any case, chat is the supplemental support option. Chat cannot "hear" you so has limitations.

They want a live agent to discuss the situation and see if they can retain your business. Since chat does not convey any audio clues it does not serve that purpose very well.

You may wish to avoid human interaction, but that is not how the business is setup.

It "is" how the business is setup. A real human chatted with me, not just the bot. The site itself says you can cancel via chat. I don't need a pitch and it won't do them any good to try -- I've already switched my service elsewhere. I just canceled the auto-billing through my credit card company. problem solved.

Any business would want to find out why you are canceling to see if they could resolve whatever you reason is. If businesses just cancel with no info, then they don't know what is going on or simply miss out on an opportunity that works for both sides.

If it doesn't work for you, fair enough. But at this point it doesn't matter since you've moved on. Laters.

Businesses don't have a right to know why you're canceling. If you tell them you want to cancel, the only right they have is to cancel the service. Their own chat bot provides a link to cancel online, and a link to do so, and once you click that link, you get the indefinite "hang tight" message above. That's about all there is to this, really. Just horrible customer service. They really need a help forum to prompt them to actually fix problems instead of a community forum. 

Business have the right to ask why you are canceling. Many are built where the agent has to type in or select a reason to process the cancellation. But yes to that point, you don't have to tell them. But personally, not giving the reason (at least in general such as avability of programming, pricing, ease of using equipment, etc.) is rather petty. Knowing why someone cancels helps a business grow, especially if there is a consistent trend at a particular time.

Beyond that, I do agree customer support needs improvement. Hopefully staffing levels will continue to rise to manageable, and that the addition of the new co-owner managing the TV services will go smoother than it did in the early days when AT&T first acquired DirecTV. Time will tell on that end.

Community forum is user to user. Official support is over the phone, with the small chat group as supplemental. To have a official help forum would require more employees which low staffing makes that a non-start. In any case be it forum, Facebook, twitter, etc. seems to be more and more not wanting to talk to a real person and just deal with the computer feel. How much longer until people are buying their computers dinner instead of real interaction (or are we already starting such a trend?).

I am also unable to cancel via the website.  I get as far as the "Are you sure this is goodbye?" page with 2 buttons: "Chat to cancel" and "Keep subscription".  First off, it sucks that I would have to chat to cancel as opposed to simply freaking canceling. Ironically, the only button that works is the option to Keep Subscription.  Seriously???  I have tried on 3 different browsers to no avail and was on hold for over 1/2hr.  I guess I'm left with having my credit card company deal with this.  You may not call this a "Scam", but it is highly unethical at best.

I'll preface this by saying that I'm an attorney. Businesses do have a right to ask why you are canceling, sure. Unless it's in your contract, they have NO right to prevent you from canceling by providing a non-functioning website or chat process when those avenues are clearly stated on the website as options for users who wish to cancel. 

Do a chargeback with your CC company. Make sure you:

1- Take screenshots of the process

2- Take a video if possible

You can also leave directv stream a bad review in the app store and with BBB and explain your frustration in great detail. Eventually it will make an impact. 

I won chargebacks for two months of billing. On the third month, I was able to get around the website issues and actually cancel the service. 

Maybe they will change soon. 

If not, at least you get your money back.

Same experience, not able to cancel online, account starts crashing when taking me to chat, everything goes haywire with my account. Get my wife to login and cancel from her phone, same thing, chat to cancel, then it keeps crashing. It is definitely coded into the app to crash when trying to cancel online, don't waste your time.

I call to cancel, get redirected 3 times, one time to a Spanish speaking rep who also speaks English, but can only cancel plan if I request it in Spanish. Finally 2 hours later I actually canceled. Don't mess with canceling online, just call, demand to cancel until it finally gets done. Have your direct tv stream account number ready or they probably won't do it.

@Bob2550 

They did seem to be moving to calling in to cancel, where originally it was online only.

The app is definitely NOT coded to crash, that is just your frustration talking and not fact. Any crashing would a technical error, not by design. The app has been replaced by a newer version (as is used for both DirecTV and DIRECTV STREAM), so if you were using the old one that was most likely the problem. However, the new one is still going through some growing pains with big updates over the coming weeks.

So if an online/app option doesn't work, then yes you call as we have done for decades. With the new co-owner taking control of operations I do hope customer support will be improving and that they will be acquiring more employees to address the short staffing.

Yeah Juniper is a shill. I'd take their advice with a grain of salt. Bottom line, the online cancellation method doesn't work, and they shouldn't be advertising that you can cancel online. It's scummy.

Agreed, bad tactics by direct tv. Just say call to cancel. Dont act like it can be done online then give people the run around. If people want to cancel they will, no reason to make them jump through 20 hoops and finally cancel in a fit of rage and frustration.

160 for cable was too much but I didn't hate the service, possibly I could have returned in the future if they developed a new option I was interested in. But now they've burned the bridge because of their tactics and I would not consider direct tv as an option in the future because of it.

You cannot cancel online or on the app. Just call, it will still be a huge pain and there will still be hoops to jump through, but at least you can eventually get your plan canceled.

Per Hanlon’s Razor, "Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity." (or incompetence).  There’s zero reason to code something to crash - it’s much simpler to just not say you can cancel that way.  

At one point in the (relatively distant) past, when it was still an AT&T service,  you could simply cancel on-line, without any human interaction.  Over time, they made that more complicated by adding more steps asking if you were sure you wanted to cancel. I’m not sure if it happened before or after the spin off, but they eventually switched to requiring you to actually go through a rep to cancel.  Their chat mechanism was fairly solid in the early days, but seems to have gotten less so over the years - it’s unclear if that is due to the offshore outfit they outsourced first level support to.  They didn’t used to allow subscribers to the predecessor streaming service(s) phone support, just use chat - it may be that chat became worse when they changed that. 

in any case, I find their first level support/customer service pretty disappointing, but canceling subscriptions is something that they really should be able to handle. 

Thank you for being honest and at least agreeing that the online customer service is subpar. It's crazy to me how some people so vehemently defend a mega-corporation who barely even knows they exist.

I don’t think it’s an isolated example - I think customer service in general (at least for consumer goods and services) has gotten worse as companies economize by outsourcing and/or are just unable to find good people to work what is undoubtedly a stressful job for what they pay.  For these sorts of things, customer service is a cost center, not a profit center, so will tend to get shortchanged.  My experience is that companies that charge for support (via support contracts and such) are much better, but that rarely flies in the consumer space.