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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."
From TFA: "Previously, AOL would distribute bonuses in the "tens of thousands of dollars" if representatives were able to retain half the customers who called to cancel their service, according to the attorney general." This just further goes to prove Scott Adams, the Dilbert comic creator, correct when he said that all management incentives lead to weasel behavior. Of course, it helps when they receive weasel directives in the first place. Also, is it too late to clone Eliot Spitzer? We need at least one of him per state, preferably more.
Are there any ethics in buisness, or is it just about the money?
I tried to cancel my cousins service over a year ago. I was on hold for over half an hour. I hung up and called back, but this time selected "new customer" and I had a person on the phone right away.
Why should a new customer get a person on the phone right away, and someone who wants to cancel service must wait a long time?
Maybe one good first law is to say "the time wait for an existing customer must be less than the time wait for a new customer". That would gaurentee that customers can cancel without having to wait and wait and wait for someone to anwser their call.
A good second law should be that a customer can dispute any service and does not have to pay for that month. If a customer disputes too many months, the service provider can drop them. But that might stop the bad service. If AOL has an outage, or dial numbers are busy, then the person should have the ability to dispute that days charge and not pay. This should be very easy to do, and not require more than 1 minutes time of the consumer.
Rosco: "If brains were gunpowder, Enos couldn't blow his nose."
Because he's the only public servant I know who actually IS a PUBLIC servant- as opposed to a bribed-and-bought puppet of the corporations.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
And who gets the fine? Not likely the consumers that had the problems to start with.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Actually that does not cancel it
http://www.visadps.com/serv-vau.html
There is no sig
I actually worked at AOL about 1996-ish. It was right when they did that infamous switch from version 2-3 and they switched from charging hourly to unlimited monthly. I happen to knopw for a fact they did not upgrade ONE SINGLE MODEM, contrary to what they told the press.
One day they sent a crew through the office to randomly pick people from tech-support and move them into what they call the "Cancel/Save Queue" because so many people were calling to cancel because they couldn't get through. I refused and was "forced to resign".
The point of this is the "Cancel/Save Queue" part. The only people that have authority to actually cancel someones account are those people, and their sole job is to talk you out of it. It *is* hard. They are told they have authority to do whatever it takes to keep you from canceling free months extra whatever else, webcam deal going on? How about a webcam then? Anything they can do to keep you even if your service is broken they will do, and they are told to not take no for an answer.
The whole reason I "resigned" (read: fired without unemployment benefits) was because I couldn't stand them and couldn't stomach the idea of kissing peoples ass when AOL was clearly at fault.
/* oops I accidentally made a comment, sorry */
I beg to differ. When big companies fall off the pinnacle, there's a tendency to blame some outside force, like broadband.
The truth is customers left because they didn't find any value in AOL's services, evidenced by the rapid non-adoption of AOL's broadband service. My mom had AOL for years, she switched because of all the silly ads she had to sit through.
AOL fell down because they were no longer relevant to their market. Same thing will happen to Microsoft, Intel and Dell. Any big company that starts treating their customers like a revenue stream. It'll take longer, but it'll happen.
The really strange thing is the people who ran AOL into the ground will all walk away with big, fat bonus checks and option buy outs. Just like in the Bush administration: Failure is not a problem.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
A reasonable fine would at least seek to negate any undeserved income generated by their practices. Suppose they overbilled 20 million customers for one month each. That's easily a half billion dollars.
If they would put Firefox, OpenOffice, and other nifty open source software in the extra space on those CDs, people would keep them around instead of throwing them in the trash.
1) Why would AOL distribute apps that they don't control or support?
2) Those CDs would quickly become dated as new versions are released. Geeks wouldn't keep them around because they can generally download what they need.
3) Not to stereotype, but do you think the typical user who is interested in AOL dial-up service is also going to be interested in trying new/different open source apps?
4) Would this typical AOL user be remotely interested in the philospohical arguments behind F/OSS or even care that those arguments exist?
Oddly enough, there are situations where F/OSS is not the answer. People that try to push F/OSS where it doesn't belong are at best wasting their (and others') time; at worst they are being counterproductive and hindering F/OSS adoption with their zealotry.
I want to drag this out as long as possible. Bring me my protractor.
I got AOL for free when I came to canada while waiting a week or so for cable internet.
:)
When I had the cable working, I told them that I do not want their service and was using it for free, while the cable comes. The lady was disappointed but cancelled it without any problem.
She did try to offer me some high speed crap, but I refused.
Apparantly the AOL Canada is better
I worked at AOL for a while, (hence why I'm leaving this at AC), and while you worked there, you where allowed an "employee+1" account. Which means, you got a free account, which was yours.
.. now, I just wanted to get my money back for an account that was closed when I left... (the company I left for, pays internet, why would I pay $25 for dial up, when they will pay for broadband?)
You needed a credit card or a paymet method in order to do this.
I requested that they close this account when I quit.
3 months after I left the company, they charged me 3 months of service for 24.95 (3 * 25 AKA $75).
I called them up, because I never used this account, nor did I think it was right for them to keep on charging me for something I wasn't using.
I got transfered to a "aol cancelation expert"
This guy had no tact. I explained to him I was an employee, and I left, and came back with "so, you got fired, huh?", he tried his best to get me to continue my service, when I definately wasn't interested. So, it took me 20 minutes to get money back, which was mine, and listen to bullshit.
The tech side of AOL is completely different, but the sales side will do anything to keep you. And, I imagine they take over quite a few older people, and weak people who won't stand up to them.
Actually, the CDs are a very good example of how unethical AOL is.
Lying to your customers is one thing, lying to your owners (ie, shareholders) is completely different, and in my opinion, worse. The CDs were all a part of AOL lying to its owners.
Most companies, when they advertise, charge it as an expense. That means that advertising expenses immediately reduce Net Income. AOL, on the other hand, took the creative tack that its advertising was a capital investment. This doesn't reduce Net Income (making the company look more profitable), with the added benefit for a (supposedly) growth company that it looks as though they are investing a lot of capital.
Therefore, if the marketing group can't hit the numbers this quarter, send out 10 million CDs! They don't affect income (therefore, don't reduce management bonuses), and, if even 100 people sign up, you've increased your subscriber base (and your bonus).
The SEC fined AOL a lot for this--this was before the mammoth $300 million settlement in 2002. They were of the opnion that advertising for online services is no different than advertising Tide. AOL is a company with a history of accounting settlements, and like Wynona Rider, it's hard for a company with the accounting shenanigan habit to just stop. Hence the even bigger fine in 2002.
Ted Turner must kick hiimself every morning for getting involved with these bozos.
I can't believe AOL still charges $24/mo for their *dialup* service. That price hasn't changed in a long time. You can get a basic DSL service for about $30/mo around here lol.
-eventhorizon
#Secret Windows Source Code, in MS C% - if (uptime >= "24 hours") then bsod() else print "Windows License Violation!"
Are you really sure that OSS' reputation will be improved by junkmailing it to millions of uninterested homes?
The Braying and Neighing of Barnyard Animals Follows.
I work in "retention" (meaning I take cancellation calls) at an AOL call center. I'm ashamed of what I do here but the money is so damn good that I'm doing it anyway, bad karma be damned.
The "saves rate" expected of us is 65%. Incredibly, we have to get two thirds of the people calling to cancel their AOL off the phone without canceling them. This pressure to hit these numbers causes retention agents to due some pretty unscrupulous things.
In training we are told a bunch of bullshit about the "value" of AOL. But that's not how it works when you get out onto the floor. Here's how it really works: You be a very good listener, repeat back to the member the cancellation reason as though you agree with them to give the member the feeling that you are to cancel their account. You be extremely nice to them and show empathy. This is to get them to let their guard down. Then you ask them to get a piece of paper and write down your email address and you start talking about keyword this and keyword that to confuse and distract them. Then you read the "full disclosure" which is a statement that basically says your account is not canceled. If they are not listening closely they will get off the phone with the feeling that you have cancelled the account even though you didn't.
Once you practice and polish the technique it works amazingly well especially on people who don't speak real good english, older folks, inner city types who have little experience dealing with good salespeople, hillbillies in Alabama and people who are just plain stupid. And since they are stupid they typically don't look at their checking or credit card statements and many months may go by before they notice that AOL is hitting them for $23.90 a month in automatic withdrawals. Do the math. It's a lot of money for AOL.
I am ashamed of myself. But my last job was tech support and I made $9.75 and hour. Here I make about $28 an hour. As soon as I save enough for a down payment for a house I'm getting out of here.
They hire one person for new applications and around a hundred for people wanting to get off.
I imagine it had more to do with the hundreds of thousands of obnoxious free ipod chasers signing up for accounts and then cancelling them.
/. sigs about it).
If AOL got involved with the Free iPods scheme and got their fingers burnt, tough **** for them. They (and others involved in the scheme) are saying to people "Free iPod! Free iPod!". It's their business scheme; they rely on the ease of exit to bait people into it. They should't whine when it backfires and people decide to exit instead of remaining signed up to a number of crappy services that they were obliged to subscribe to in order to receive their "Free iPod" (*).
They can change the conditions if they like; of course, fewer people might sign up then, but that's their problem.
I don't always like the "Your business scheme sucks; not my problem" as an excuse to screw over businesses, but in this case they're promoting a "Free iPod", and they shouldn't ******* bitch if that's what people expect. That doesn't make people "obnoxious" if they try to obtain what was promised by following the rules (though it does if they put spam in their
Frankly, if I thought it was worth my time to play the scheme, I would. If AOL were misled about how the scheme worked, they should sue the promoters. Either way, you can't blame the end users.
(*) Matter of fact, the commonly-accepted modern use of the term by businesses and manufacturers is misleading in my opinion, because it's not "free" from obligation.
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
I think the original poster was pretty clear on why he didn't want to help the queue: he didn't believe that talking people out of cancelling their subscription, when he believed AOL to be at fault, was the right thing to do. This is not the same as "password resets" or troubleshooting other issues.
I signed up for AOL to use the Free time (90 days, 45 days, etc.) a few years back. At the end of the trial period I would call in to cancel. Almost every time it was difficult to cancel the service, and would take serveral attempts. At one point I couldn't afford Internet, and it worked to my advantage as the reps would give me free time to keep me on. I figured it was likely that they were hoping I would forget to call at the end of the extended time and be charged, but as long as kept calling back in, the kept extending it. They even switched me from AOL to Netscape Online (same service, but older versions of the AOL software) to CompuServe.
From what I heard (rumor), the techs were held accountable for losing accounts, so they would do anything to keep from having an account disappear on their watch. Bad policy, and I don't know how AOL could afford such a policy unless enough people would really forget to make it worth it.
In any regards, I am certainly glad that they are being held accountable for it.
Truth is like the sun. You can shut it out for a time, but it ain't goin' away. - Elvis Presley (source: imdb.com)
Are you people dolts. It is not illegal to try to talk someone into keeping their service by offering them free stuff or better service. That's called a good business idea. Have you ever cancelled a magazine subscription, or your cable? It's business 101 try to keep turnover of clients down because billing changeover is costly. Plus they were supporting a 10 million plus infrastructure and in the beginning I was damn glad aol was around because at that time all there was was BBS local, unless I wanted to make a long distance call to another ISP.