Setanta Sports cancellation fiasco

I have just phoned setanta to cancel and am told to phone back on Saturday or Sunday to cancel, even though I was told to phone no later than this Friday when I started my free trial.
I was told by the woman (who would not give me her name, ID or anything to verify that I called them)on the phone that she Could not do anything until then and began attempting to hide behind a manager with no name and the data protection act...
Eventually I got passed to a chap called 'Dan' who is the team leader, he said I had a minimum term of 30 days and cannot cancel until that is finished, although I was sat with the T&C's in my hand when he made this story up.
He said he didn't have time to clarify exactly what part of the t&c's he was quoting but would phone me back(yeah right, i belive him).
I will now write to them via recorded delivery and cancel my account and also cancel my credit card, as I can almost guarantee that they will try to take £20 once my 2 months free trial is finished (How's that £10 a month, no contract, getting up to £20 for the 3rd month!!!)
I will let you know how I get on, but could have almost had a bet with Mr Hill that Setanta would try this caper out, what a bunch or spanners.

Words of warning;
Setanta offer rubbish programmes (other than the Liverpool matches) and via their preferred platform, freeview, only give you setanta sports1. Go via Sky and you get 1,2 & 3, Arsenil TV and liverpool TV, which would have been a little better I suppose.
Do not take up their free trial, it is just a way of ripping you off by not letting you cancel your contract.

Letter to Setanta:

Please treat this letter as an official complaint, and please send me details of your complaints process, including escalation paths, and which ombudsman is relevant to your services.
I have been trying to cancel my Setanta subscription since 4th October 2007, when I wrote to this address, as per your terms and conditions. As we were in the middle of a postal strike at the time, I also sent an email on 8th October. I followed this up with a telephone call to Sam in your call centre on the 9th of October, who confirmed that the service would be cancelled 30 days from the date of my letter, once the letter was received, and promised to note our conversation on my account (something which I specifically requested in an attempt to avoid the problems I have since experienced).
Despite these three contacts notifying you of my intention to cancel, on 14th November you took another payment from my bank via direct debit, which I did not notice until today. I have now cancelled my direct debit with you, and hereby notify you of that. Please note that I have only taken this action after failing to get any semblance of sense during fifty minutes of calls with your company this evening (including hold time).
This evening I called your customer service number 0871 2003322, and was told that you had not received my letter, and had no record of my call on 9th October. I did not take the name of the person I spoke to first (and doubt he has lognoted the call either), but he sounded disinterested and eventually transferred me to the queue for your Account Management team (which, unbeknownst to me, was about fifteen minutes long at that time).
When made it through the queue, I spoke to Karly, who was very pleasant and friendly, but advised that it takes 28 days to process a cancellation, and that I should wait for my letter to be processed, as she is not empowered to backdate the cancellation. I pointed out that, even with the 28 days, the cancellation should have been processed by now, and asked to speak to her manager, in the hope that he may have the authority to backdate the cancellation. I then spoke to Karly’s manager Bryan Hall, who apparently had been on his lunch (possibly why he resented speaking to me?).
I would like Bryan’s line manager to listen to that call, as Bryan really should not be speaking to customers. I will admit that I became irate with him, and eventually called him a muppet, but anyone with any call coaching experience will clearly hear that he drove this reaction by adopting an adversarial manner, talking over me, and basically trying to engineer a reason to terminate the call. I wouldn’t expect a front-line representative to have such poor customer care skills, let alone a manager.
Bryan was not willing to backdate the cancellation, and took great offence when I used the word “claimed” whilst trying to explain to him that I did not feel that I should be penalised when, after making three contacts to you, all clearly stating my request to cancel, Setanta claimed not to have received my letter or telephone call. I had gotten as far as the word “claimed” when Bryan flew off the handle, became aggressive, and began driving the aforementioned deterioration of the call to a point where he could hang up on me.
As I have explained to all four members of your staff today that I have a record of the 9th October call on my BT bill:
Other £0.365
Includes calls which do not fit into previous call categories.
Date Time Destination Number Duration Cost (£) Called from
09 Oct 14:23 Special Svce 0871 2003322 0000:03:41 0.365 XXXXXXXXXX
(Nb. The above is pasted from a PDF file. A hard copy of this is being included in with the hard copy of this letter).
I therefore do not accept Setanta's unreasonable claim that this call never happened. The fact that your agent Sam failed to detail the nature of the call is a failure of your processes, and clearly I should not be penalised for that. As I pointed out to your staff – how would I know that you had someone called Sam working at that time on that day? What else would I reasonably be calling about?
After Bryan hung up on me, I called back in to complain about him, and was escalated to Darren Durie, who was polite and helpful, but ultimately, not empowered by your company to help me, or to resolve my cancellation issue. Darren has advised me to put my complaint in writing, hence this letter. It should be obvious to your Operations manager that, had Darren been empowered to help, or Bryan had some common sense, your company could have save the cost of processing this complaint. NOT a very effective use of your resources!
I would like the following actions taken:
1. Please cancel my subscription to the Setanta Sports Pack with effect from 2nd November 2007 (which is 30 days from the date of my original letter, dated 4th October 2007), and send me a cheque for the monies you owe me.
2. I would like reimbursement for the cost of my call charges today, which I estimate at £5 to be added to the aforementioned cheque, as a minimum gesture of goodwill. I feel this is reasonable as the calls themselves, and their subsequent lengths, were only necessitated by the incompetence of your processes/staff/training/etc.
3. I would like the cost of sending this letter by recorded delivery to be added to the amount of the aforementioned cheque. Recorded delivery has only been necessitated due to your claim that my letter dated 4th October was not received by you.
4. I would like a written apology from Setanta.
5. I would like a telephone call from Bryan’s line manager, once he has listened to the call, to tell me whether he thinks Bryan’s manner was appropriate or not.
Finally, I would like to end by pointing out that, as I have pointed out to all your staff:
1. Your business model is based around not tying customers to 12 month contracts, rather giving customers the ability to choose to sign up for the months when there is sport that they want to watch being shown (eg their football team is being shown).
2. This flexibility only works if customers find it easy to order (achieved) and easy to cancel.
3. There is already a significant amount of discussion on various Internet sites, warning subscribers to avoid Setanta due to the difficulty of cancelling the service.
4. Anyone who reads the rapidly growing warnings on the Internet, or has had the negative experience of trying to cancel your service, will be unlikely to ever subscribe again, seriously undermining your business model as described in (1).
So, your company will make some short term revenue gains because the initial option of “no contract” will attract business, and the ingress gained from your phone lines must be significant indeed - just look at the size of the queue for your Account Management (cancellations) department, not to mention the terrible processes and poor service, all of which increase your inbound call volume and call lengths.
However, you will struggle to retain customers, to re-attract ex-customers, and your subscriber base will be significantly reduced by August 2008 at the latest, as the vast majority of those who signed up to watch Premier League football will have tried to cancel, had the negative experience, and resolved never to sign-up with you again. And they will have told their friends, business associates, the bloke in the pub, used you as an example at a business conference, the list is endless.
Surely the sensible solution would be to fix your cancellation process, empower your staff, measure and target your staff as part of their KPIs to ensure that they provide a lognote for each call, and either train people like Bryan Hall in how to speak to customers, or manage them out of your business before they ruin it.

Yours sincerely