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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.
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 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?