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AOL Fined for Making it Hard to Cancel Service
andy1307 writes "CNET is carrying an article about a settlement between AOL and New York State that includes AOL paying a $1.25 million fine and agreeing to reform its customer service procedures. The agreement stems from consumers' complaints that AOL customer service representatives would either ignore requests, or make it unduly difficult, to cancel their service, according to a statement from Attorney General Eliot Spitzer. The policy probaby had something to do with rapidly declining customer numbers at AOL as more Americans switch to broadband."
Count me among the hoardes that hate AOL. I have horror stories.
This article deals with one of them. I know a lot of people who have a hard time cancelling their service with AOL. My dad tried cancelling the service three or four times and ended up sending them a certified letter to get them to stop bugging him.
Another issue I have with AOL is that AOL digs roots very deeply into your computer. I don't know if this is still true since I haven't seen anyone using the service in a while, but it used to do stuff like replace your built-in dial-up networking functionality with its own, and even replacing various parts of the TCP/IP software and system files with its own. Uninstall? Useless. I've completely reinstalled many people's computers just to get AOL off of them. It's ironic that now their ads pitch the service as a way of protecting people from stuff that screws up their computer.
I've also dealt a lot with "This thing isn't working" complaints. People who can't get through, people who do get through but only very slowly, people whose other software starts experiencing mysterious problems, and so on ad nauseum.
There's a reason that AO "Hell" has such a bad reputation, and whenever anyone I know says, "America Online has a good deal on Internet service; I think I'll sign up," I always tell them, "I highly recommend against that, and no offense, but if you do, don't call me to come fix your computer."
The company I work for had a brief co-branding partnership with AOL, and as a result, all employees were offered a free year of AOL service. I work in the IT department, and almost everyone I know turned it down because the service, even free, just wasn't worth it. Actually, come to think of it, one guy I worked with gave his account to his parents and then spent the next year fixing their computer...
And speaking of AOL's declining membership and miserable service, I guess Time Warner has to be feeling a little bit better about their decision to drop AOL from its name. Ooh, cheap shot.
Meanwhile, if you're experiencing problems cancelling AOL, try one suggestion I found: call the phone number on your credit card statement.
Serves the bastards right...about 10 years ago, my GF at the time had AOL and cancelled...they just kept debiting her checking account, regardles of the flood of angry emails, snail mail letters, and phone calls she loosed upon them. In the end, she had to talk to the bank and persuade them to stop paying out to AOL. We could have stopped the abuse more easily by simply closing out the account, but she flatly refused to do that, on general principles (she was a very stubborn woman).
____
~ |rip/\/\aster /\/\onkey
I've told people for the last 8+ years that the only way to cancel AOL is to call your credit card company and report the card lost.
AOL canceled.
Who will guard the guards?
If a custommer is indeed screwed by AOL, take them to small claims court and get your 1500 bucks out of them, problem solved and I have some money to pay for my inconvienience.
Yes, because big companies pay attention when a few dozen people sue them in small claims court. Face it, refusing to terminate service is illegal, or should be.
"We returned the General to El Salvador, or maybe Guatemala, it's difficult to tell from 10,000 feet"
AOL back in the mid 90's allowed you to cancel your account right online? I definately remember cancelling Prodigy and also CompuServe (before AOL bought it) online... wouldnt take more than 5 minutes to do! Sign on Keyword Cancel Click Cancel Fill out a brief "Why are you cancelling" Confirmation Number Sign Off Cancelled at the end of your billing period! Those were the days!
http://www.oag.state.ny.us/press/2005/aug/aug24a_0 5.html
.
AOL TO REFORM CUSTOMER SERVICE PROCEDURES
Settlement Requires Company to Remove Obstacles
Consumers Face When Seeking to Switch or Cancel Service
Attorney General Eliot Spitzer today announced an agreement that requires the nation's leading internet service provider to reform its customer service procedures.
Under the agreement, America Online (AOL) will alter the incentives it offers to customer representatives who seek to persuade subscribers not to cancel their service.
"This agreement helps ensure that AOL will strive to keep its customers through quality service, not stealth retention programs," Spitzer said.
In response to approximately 300 consumer complaints, Spitzer's office began an inquiry of AOL's customer service policies. The investigation revealed that the company had an elaborate system for rewarding employees who purported to retain or "save" subscribers who had called to cancel their internet service. In many instances, such retention was done against subscribers' wishes, or without their consent.
Under the system, consumer service personnel received bonuses worth tens of thousands of dollars if they could successfully dissuade or "save" half of the people who called to cancel service. For several years, AOL had instituted minimum retention or "save" percentages, which consumer representatives were expected to meet. These bonuses, and the minimum "save" rates accompanying them, had the effect of employees not honoring cancellations, or otherwise making cancellation unduly difficult for consumers.
Many consumers complained that AOL personnel ignored their demands to cancel service and stop billing.
The agreement requires AOL to:
Eliminate any requirements that its customer service representatives maintain a minimum number of "saves" in order to earn a bonus;
Record all service cancellation requests and verify action on the request through a third-party monitor;
Provide refunds to all New York consumers who claim harm based on improper cancellation procedures, up to four months worth of service;
Pay $1.25 million to the state in penalties and costs.
The claim form for New York consumers seeking refunds is available at Attorney General Spitzer's web site http://www.oag.state.ny.us/internet/internet.html
Spitzer thanked AOL for working with his office to resolve the matter.
The case was handled by Assistant Attorney General Elizabeth Nieliwocki, under the direction of Kenneth Dreifach, who is Chief of the Attorney General's Internet Bureau, and with the assistance of Special Assistant Attorney General Gille Anne Rabbin and Investigator Vanessa Ip.
Attachment:
Claim Form
Long ago, in a far away land called USENET visitors from the land of AOL would come and make damn fools of themselves. They would ask for the dumbest things and threaten non-AOL users that they would be kicked off the Internet because they were going to complain to AOL. Some were clueful or polite but rarely, often they would ask for advice about downloading Pr0n or Warez.
Any such question would be followed up by no less then 6 more requests of 'ME TOO!!!!". If they found your email address they would send you mail asking for advice about Pr0n or whatever. Mostly they would ask if you were a young boy or girl.
Sorry about the writing. Robot fingers, you know? Cliff Steele in DOOM PATROL #23
i actually got about eight months of aol completely free off a free trial / unlimited hours disk because they would keep saying "give it another month on us and reconsider." then the broadband network was finally finished...
always mosh clockwise
I happen to knopw for a fact they did not upgrade ONE SINGLE MODEM, contrary to what they told the press.
Oh, really? Because I used to sit in on plenty of meetings and see plenty of reports with Matt Korn, Gerry, and everyone else who spent all day, every day getting Sprint, ANS, etc. to buy and install hundreds of thousands of modems that they knew would be useless in five years. Which led Sprint, ANS, etc. to bang down the doors of the hardware manufacturers until they cranked up their assembly lines, and then to overload the colo's with modems until Verizon, et al. were forced to build new central offices to handle the peak demand, which of course was now radically different from the peak-to-installed-base ratio that had worked to model telephone usage for the past 100 years. Thus resulting in slow dial tones for everyone, AOL user or not, until the entire national telephone infrastructure caught up to the demand. And then we could put in the modems.
So, yeah, that was my vantage point. I saw the numbers and heard it from the horse's mouth. Tell me, from your cube in, where, Ogden, Tucson, how did you "know for a fact" was was going on back in Dulles, and in colos around the country? I started in tech support myself, and even then, in the same building as the developers, there was plenty of "floor lore" - things we knew that simply had no basis in fact. We "knew for a fact" that Q-Link would load faster if you wrapped the drive in tinfoil. So when you say "know for a fact", I'm curious how you think you know it. And, honestly, refusing to help out by working on an overloaded phone queue (out of some principle you don't quite enunciate) doesn't make you look like the most cooperative, in-the-loop kinda guy. In my day, when one queue was overloaded, we all helped out, even if it meant password resets. Were you guys too good for that?
Yes, AOL made a hell of a lot of mistakes in those days, but lying to the public about our infrastructure was not one of them. If you're gonna accuse my buds of fabrication, you're gonna have to give some facts, and you're gonna want to sign a name.
Jay "The Mail Guy" Levitt
AOL Employee, 1989-2001
Have you ever done anything useful in your life?
- Compose the following letter:
-
Insert letter in an envelope and seal.
- Place first class postage stamp on envelope
- Send it via US Mail to
- Alternatively, you may FAX the letter to
Sure, it costs you the price of a postage stamp or a 1 minute long-distance call, but if you place any value on your time at all, you will come out way ahead using this method.Your name
Your address
Your city, State and ZIP code
xx/xx/xxxx
Dear America Online-
I wish to cancel my America Online account, effective immediately. My screen name is: screenname.
Please confirm in writing that you have cancelled my account, as set forth in section 7 of the America Online Member Agreement.
Sincerely,
Your name
America Online, Inc.
PO Box 17100
Jacksonville, FL 32245-7100
(904) 232-4879
"Avoid employing unlucky people - throw half of the pile of CVs in the bin without reading them." -- David Brent
Ah, ok - we're talking about two different things, I think. You're talking about whether extra modems were installed before the price change.
They were - we were always adding modems, trying to stay ahead of the curves, monitoring busy-signal counts from RBOCs in every city, setting up banks of test computers dialing all the access numbers to see oursleves - but obviously we didn't plan well enough. We simply had no idea just how much pent-up demand there was for unlimited AOL service, and we weren't ready for the onslaught of calls.
Then again, if we had waited till Verizon, Sprint, et al. could build up the infrastructure to handle the load - and if they would have even done that based on supposition and Excel projections - it would have been a year or two before we could offer unlimited pricing, and we'd be out of business by then. So though I don't like the business decision to go ahead, and nobody liked the results, I understand the thinking.
Certainly, once the busy-signals hit the fan, we were getting modems added daily, and Steve Case himself was posting updates to the welcome screen - I can't remember anymore if the actual numbers were up there, or just listings of what cities had been upgraded.
And yeah, if they were simply gonna transfer you permanently to the cancel/save queue, that sucks - I thought you meant "for the day". That's just a prime example of the management problems that stemmed from your best friend and mine, KB "and the ladies can go shopping" J. So I retract my flame for that part; I would have done the same thing.
But you might wanna rethink what "know for a fact" means!
I sent them a sharply worded letter of complaint and cancellation, but a friend of mine who teaches telecommunication law recommended I go beyond that and register a complaint with the Federal Trade Commission in addition to the more obvious choices of the BBB and the FCC. It seems like a good way to get AOL's attention.
Incidentally, the BBB now has a nice automated system on line for filing complaints against AOL or any other misbehaving business.
Jeremy Butler
www.ScreenSite.org
www.TVCrit.com