We were using a small service for a particular technology task for several years.

Over the last 12 months or so, I was able to remove the need for paying for this service by utilizing tools that we already had in house, and improving some processes.

Here is the funny part.

As this service was a credit card based monthly charge, When my predecessor left, the charges were moved to my own corporate credit card.

So my name is paying the bills

I contacted the service vendor to cancel the service and was told I could not - I had to use their on-line self service portal with my user name and password that had been created when we first contracted for the service.

I explained that the gentleman that created that account was no longer with us, and that I had absolutely no idea what user name and password that he would have chosen. And that I obvously did not have an account of my own.

It took three days of phone calls and e-mails where I finally stated that if they did not cancel the account, I would have to have our credit card company do a stop payment on any transaction from their organization.

The fact that my name was on the credit card "bill to" line - Well that was not good enough for them.

It took still another conversation to 'confirm' that myself and the credit card were inextricably bonded to each other to get them to capitulate.

The takeaway,

Self service can reduce costs, but when it is myopically designed as this organization had designed theirs, they actually increaed their cost of service, not to mention lost any reference from me!