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AOL Tries New Tactic to Keep Customers
Jhon writes "AOL customer Vincent Ferrari tried to cancel his account, but a phone rep wouldn't let him do it. What he got when he tried to cancel his account was a lot of frustration. Now that's customer support!"
It got him fired when publicity came out. AOL has had a long history of this. I ran into this years and years ago when trying to cancel a free 100 hours account before broadband. The victim is probably Vincent who was just doing what his supervisor told him to do. But, atlas, that's what you get to be when the bottom falls out; the scapegoat at the bottom.
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Couldn't he just stop paying the bill? Wouldn't that cancel the account? Or is there something that I'm not aware of?
Hang up.
Call your credit card company.
Tell the credit card company to no longer accept charges from AOL because they refuse to cancel your account.
If you really want to play it safe then write a letter to your credit card company after the call that reiterates the request and the reason for it.
Either the retention specialist/customer service agent/phone troll was lying about the usage (huge surprise) or the account was hijacked. I have nothing against a company clarifying why you want to cancel -- they may make you a special offer or fix what is causing the issue -- but this is beyond ridiculous and bordering on criminal.
The problem is I am sure this has been standard operating procedure at AOL every single day for the last decade. Everyone that has experienced this level of customer "service" needs to complain to the FTC and hopefully they will investigate. If memory serves, wasn't AOL already investigated for this by the FTC in years past?
So you faxed over "SN, pw, last 4 digits of CC, name, address" to some unconfirmed number that you got from the Internet? Why not offer your mother's maiden name while you're at it.
A valid CSR retention attempt might go something like this:
Customer: I want to cancel my account
CSR: OK, can I ask why>
Customer: Because I never use it anymore
CSR: Oh, do you have DSL or Cable?
Customer: No, my phone charges are too high
CSR:: Ok, well before I cancel it, would you allow me to try to find you a better dial-up access number to try, which should reduce or eliminate your local phone charges?
...
Then from here, either the customer says "No, I've had it" and the CSR complies, or maybe the customer says "You can do that? Sure..."
Not every CSR conversation has to go like this:
Customer: I want to cancel
CSR: Done. Thanks. bye.
-- "In order to have power, I must be taken seriously." -Mojo Jojo
a) This usually saves lots of space and you can partition the way you like.
b) You know what you have, and only load what you want.
c) You can then image the minimal "clean" install for later recovery, cleanup, etc.
This method works wonders - my last el-cheapo HP Pavilion laptop went from 63 second boot time to under 30 seconds when it wasn't burdened with stuff I didn't want/need.
Just make sure you have any special drivers you'll need "on hand" before you do this.
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
That's all well and good, as long as this can still happen:
Customer: I want to cancel my account
CSR: OK, can I ask why
Customer: No, I just want to cancel my account. I know what I'm doing, and I'm certain I don't want it.
CSR: No problem, it's done. Thanks. Bye.
I don't know about the english speaking part of the world, but in my country the phone is not part of the legally enforceable mean of contracting.
If they refuse to cancel by phone, write a letter and that's it. If in doubt, send it with registered mail. And yes, fellow Geeks, it doesn't even matter if you use a template in MS Word or KOMA-script with LaTeX!
I find the advice to---again---call the fraud dept. of the institution that handles payment for you potentially dangerous. If I had a contrct with AOL I'd sure know how to EOL that---the correct way.
But again, your legal system might differ... Mod me down then!
Every virus out there would perform the uninstall on your behalf if it were easy.
A good number of viruses do infact uninstall or otherwise disable the software.
So in this case, I can forgive a difficult uninstall.
You've said it right there, he's paid to harass. This is not a case of "just a peon". Perhaps not entirely "goon" either, since harassment probably doesn't reach the threshold of "terrorize" that the term "goon" implies. Still, a CSR trying to out-argue, out-badger or just out-annoy a cancelling customer is not completely blameless if the customer becomes annoyed and shows it.
You then give a different example (the luxury hotel) where politeness and class are appropriate. Presumably the staff at your hotel didn't try to pressure guests not to leave, then refuse to check them out and badger them until they gave up trying to stop paying for a room and just left with the meter running. Naturally, a bullying guest would not be welcome back, but this is an entirely different context. It's late, and I forget the debating term for this practice is -- some kind of fallacy.
Before your context-switch, the subject was dealing with CSRs who deliberately try to avoid processing your cancellation request. I'm sorry that you've had to deal with jerks from the other side. But it is not reasonable to assume that a customer who is repeatedly thwarted in their request will not become annoyed and show his anger in some way.
Your argument about banning a customer for life would actually be the ideal situation with AOL -- so in that case, if AOL followed your reasoning, the empty threat would pay off far better than the customer imagined.
I am not a crackpot.
They don't want to let you go if they think they can meet your needs. Be sure your needs are not met by their walled garden.
What they want is completely immaterial. If I were unfortunate enough to have an AOL account to cancel, I would call them once to cancel it, and if they didn't do so immediately without any form of runaround, I would cancel by sending a registered letter to their general counsel, advising them that if they didn't terminate my account as of the date of the phone call and immediately inform me that they had done so, I would go down to my local courthouse, file suit, and ask the court to certify a class.
The key is to make it far more expensive to jerk you around than to just do the right thing.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Regardless of what you think of the policy, the guy on the other end is just a peon, not a "goon." He's doing this so he can pay rent, not because he enjoys harassing you -- got it? He has no control over the script.
No, I don't got it. He has 100% control over whether what is printed in the script comes out of his mouth.
Are you saying that for enough money anything is OK? Are you insane? (I guess the technical term is "sociopathic") Does what Enron did suddenly become OK because they made a lot of money at it?
Money has zero to do with morality. When you choose to enforce a policy, you are making a choice. The fact that you get a paycheck for it has zero to do with the moral decision. You may be willing to sell your morals for a given price, but that doesn't absolve you of the guilt.
If you steal bread to feed your family because the system is corrupt, that doesn't make the stealing OK. It makes it justifiable.
Your mother probably tried (but apparently failed) to teach you this as the doctrine of "Two wrongs don't make a right."
Now let's toss in that, unless this is a call center in a third world country, the hypothetical person reading an immoral script was not doing it because it was the only possible way to avoid starvation. He was doing it because he decided he would rather do that than sweep floors or clean toilets or any of a thousand other shitty, but morally straight, jobs that are available in this country. So he doesn't have impending doom to justify, let alone sanctify, his choice.
That doesn't mean a person can't, or even shouldn't, choose to sell their morals in this incredibly immoral society (by which I'm referring to the robber barons, not people who enjoy recreational sex - but that's my moral set), but it does mean that they are 100% judgeable for their actions. It's called "personal responsibility" and it is the exact same thing which we all find so lacking in congress. It's no better in an individual than in a public official.
Stop-Prism.org: Opt Out of Surveillance
I find it disturbing that you need to explain why you are cancelling your online account, and in fact come up with excuses for it. I find it especially disturbing when combined with the other posts in this thread, explaining how they had to cancel their credit card since they couldn't get AOL to cancel the account, and how they spent an hour trying to get the account cancelled.
I think this is a clear example of what happens when the government isn't powerfull enough to force companies to behave. Those companies fill the power vacuum and stat behaving like medieval lords, treating people like as serfs. You americans really need to get rid of your delusion that only the government needs to be regulated; any entity that has power is capable of abusing it, and needs to be kept from doing so - which doesn't neccessarily mean laws, of course; peer pressure works fine for limiting socially distruptive excesses of human behavior most of the time. Corporations, however, are specifically designed to be shameless, heartless and powerfull, and should be held to the same standards as the government, since they are every bit as capable of oppressing and harming people as the government is.
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
Just because you don't see it doesn't mean you aren't infected. Many viruses are invisible to the end user as they collect your personal info, use your box as a proxy for higher profit targets or just act as a zombie in a DDoS botnet. I laugh everytime someone says "I don't use AV and I've never had a virus." It's like a blind man saying "I've never seen it so it doesn't exist."
chown -R us
Vincent's own terminology put him in the trap. Telling the rep "cancel my account" implies that the rep can argue. The right approach is this: "I have now informed you that I'm cancelling. That's all I have to do according to my contract. I am no longer bound by the contract no matter what you say and no matter whether you put the cancellation in your systems or not. I'm not in a mood for argument, so I'm going to hang up. Have a nice day and remember, if you charge me next month you'll be committing credit card fraud. [click]"
I hadn't run an anti-virus for years. Finally a couple of years ago I broke down and got it just for the off chance I miss something. The first time it scanned, it didn't find a thing. No Firewall. Nothing.
It's easy. Don't open executables in e-mails. Don't view attachments from people you don't know. Don't go to shady sites.
www.joshferguson.org
Corporations have money and can buy guns to make you do things. The only thing that's keeping them from doing that is the government. But even without guns, the corporation has enough financial resources to bankcrupt you (with made-up charges which are too expensive to defend against, for example); and finally, since government is so weak, it is pending to the will of the corporations, which means that they do have guns, even if it's their servant that does the actual wielding.
I have no idea how AOL is doing financially. I do know that this thread is full of complaints about how the AOL behaves, so obviously their financial status - whatever it is - and the market combined isn't making them behave.
And why would the market make them behave ? The market is simply a decentralized distribution channel - a matter of logistics, not social control. The whole concept of an "invisible hand" has been proven wrong so many times that it's absurd how many people still seem to cling to it like a poor substitute for a religion.
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.