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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 seems that "customer service" reps are trained now to intentionally make a caller angry in order to give them justification to cut off the caller for "verbal abuse". it's happened to me more than once.
He was a scapegoat. AOL is responsible. They put unreasonable pressure on the employee to keep customers on the phone. They don't tell them 'how', they just tell them to make sure they do it.
This is the same way big companies get their retail outlet managers to stiff workers out of overtime/benefits. By giving them unreasonable goals and incentives that are only achived by doing things that a corporation doesn't want to own up to doing themselves. So, they pass they buck, the blame, but not the profit.
I would urge this employee to take action. I for one am witness to AOL doing this very thing. Remember, those calls are monitored. They can't pretend not to condone this activity. I am sure that there are ex AOL employees that were rewarded for doing the same thing.
Try to uninstall the "free trial" of McAfee on any new Dell PC.
You can't - it conveniently gives you an error message. I've confirmed this on a variety of Dell PCs.
This isn't an accident. Sure, you can reboot in safe mode and uninstall it but they know that the average user isn't a geek (trust me, it takes an average user weeks/months to follow simple step-by-step instructions to uninstall Dell's McAfee and install Avast). So they prey on them.
It is about time that someone sued the pants off of them. Where are the ambulance chasers of the tech world?
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I just helped a 60-year-old man deal with this.
His bank couldn't refuse the transaction because it wasn't billed from AOL.com but as a point-of-sale transaction. In other words, instead of being a recurring monthly charge from a known entity, it was just like the poor guy had walked up and handed AOL his credit card once a month.
Which somehow meant that it was a different category of transaction that could not be blocked by the bank in question.
Even more humorous, the guy's son (now a 24 year old off playing GI Joe in Iraq) had set him up with the account around four years previous. He's been a DSL subscriber essentially the whole time, didn't even know he had AOL service. And AOL told him that his son would have to cancel the account. The one on the old man's credit card. In his name, not his son's.
After more than 40 minutes of arguing and another 20 talking to his bank, I think he's cancelling the card AOL was billing. I can't wait to hear that AOL forced the account back open, 'cause I'm sure that's what will happen next.
-- I wanna decide who lives and who dies - Crow T. Robot, MST3K
The guy that empties the fax basket? He doesn't give a shit; his job isn't based on the number of accounts he's managed to keep active.
It's not new at all. They were doing that back... '97 I think, is when I was first exposed to it. They made it just about impossible for someone to cancel. The information on how to do it is kept as far from sight as possible, when you finally find it your told you *must* do it over the telephone, when you call the phone line you get to sit on hold for literally *hours* in some cases, when you finally get someone, it's a kid who has been trained for one thing and one thing only - to outstubborn you. They are *required* to spend about half an hour reading speech after speech to you, ask you questions and get your responses and read more speeches based on them, all designed to get you to throw your hands up in frustration and give up. Cancelling your account without going through every question and every speech and exhausting the flow chart will get the kid fired. If (as many people do) you tell him to cancel your account and hang up to avoid the next ten minute scripted reply, he's trained to pretend he didn't hear that. Even if he does everything as trained, if he cancels more than a tiny percentage of the callers he gets, he'll be fired. It's absolutely absurd, and I don't see how these bastards continue to get away with it.
My advice - don't use AOL. If for any reason you *must* use AOL, use a one-time credit card solely for that purpose. When you're ready to cancel, send them a registered letter telling them you are hereby cancelling your account, and cancel the card. It may sound like a lot of trouble, but it's NOTHING compared to trying to the living hell of trying to get it cancelled by calling their cancellation department.
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Friends don't let friends enable ecmascript.
Digg mentioned a story about a dead woman and AOL refuses to cancel!
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
My variation on that is to boot it, toss a copy \winnt\system and system32 to another box on the network and then reformat.
Not having to go to a shitty website to download 30 drivers (clicking "I agree" to a 26 page license agreement for each file) saves me tons of time (especially for laptops, dear god, the freaking scroll wheel needs a driver?). Just keep on pointing windows to one of those 2 folders and you'll have a fully working system in far less time than running the installs, etc.
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The 64-bit version would probably be roughly twice as slow. Remember, kiddies: 64-bits instead of 32 bits means you need 2x the RAM. Not to mention, Athlon 64s seem to perform better in 32-bit mode, anyway. Probably because very few applications actually use 64 bit integers for anything. 32 bits is generally more than enough.
I got the same treatment a while back when I was cancelling an account from AOL -- not quite as bad, but close. The rep kept offering me free months in exchange for not cancelling.
Ditto, but when I tried to cancel (years ago), I talked them into giving me 6 months free, threw a reminder into my pda to call them in 5 months and 3 weeks and did the same thing over and over for just under 2 years. It was actually kind of crazy and was a running joke in the family for a while.
Free dialup access sometimes is nice, even in this day and age where pretty much every hotel has wifi.
The way I see it, this way everyone wins - the CSRs got their brownie points for retention and "Hey, umm... you do realize that I've had your service for free for 2 years" is a great way to kick the CSR into reality and letting you cancel without too much trouble.
Mooching free stuff off retention CSRs can be fun and profitable too. Hold times are usually the shortest out of all the branches too.
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This link made front page on digg yesterday:
AOL Wants to Sell "Internet" to the Dead
They refused to cancel the account of her dead mother. Didn't make a big difference since all her credit cards were cancelled, but crazy nonetheless.
I get any resistance, and I will imply very strongly that the rep is placing himself at very strong risk of personal legal expense.
Bullshit attitudes like this, not (usually) any fault of CSRs, are why customer service sucks so much for both parties involved. People like you are solely responsible for the low quality of customer service personnel, as everyone who can find his ass with two hands goes to do something -- anything -- else because of these unnecessarily unpleasant interactions. I dealt with your type for two years before getting out, and, even though it's been a long time, I can't just sit back and listen to you spout this sort of drivel.
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. If you are upset by the script, ask to talk to a supervisor, or write the company a complaint letter. Ridiculous threats of personal legal action against someone with no control, that would get laughed out of any court on the face of the planet, just make you look like the irrationally angry, whiny moron you are.
Spouting empty threats not only doesn't help you, it actively hurts you. When I was a manager at an independent luxury hotel, no guest who threatened me or any of my employees like this would ever get a discount rate, an upgrade, a freebie, or hard-to-get reservations or tickets. Ever again. For life. Yes, we had records. And, if a guest was bad enough, the hotel would just somehow be full every time he called for a reservation, no matter who he talked to. People like you cost more in hassle and time we could spend serving the other customers than they generate in revenue. Good riddance.
On the other hand, we happily did all sorts of wonderful favors for people who somehow found it within themselves to display a tiny bit of class when interacting with us. Remember, the peon may have the ability to help you out or hook you up, if you do the same for him by letting him do his job and treating him like a fellow human being.
Jeez, the longer I sit here and stare at your post, the madder I get. But instead of threatening to sic a make-believe lawyer on you, I think I'll just go have a beer. Have a nice night, idiot.
- This call has outlived its usefulness, and is effectively over. You have failed to respond to my needs as a valued (?) customer, so please listen to what I have to say regarding the current status of our business relationship.
- I am sending a letter (return receipt) to AOL's corporate address indicating that I am cancelling the service and my dissatisfaction with the customer service I've received. I will be naming you specifically. AOL will have a difficult time at best trying to justify further charges when given written notice of cancellation, regardless of what their policy says is the "proper" way to cancel.
- Any further attempts to charge my card will be at the very least disputed. Welcome to the Wonderful World of Chargebacks.
- Both of us have been aware during the entire time of this call that it was being recorded - I was explicitly told at the beginning of the call, and you are already aware that you're always being recorded. What *you* were not aware of is that it was not just the call center that was making a recording. When we're done, this call and a narrative of my experience are going up onto the Internet and into the court of public opinion, as well as in my file for later use if needed. (This should perk up some ears right away if a supervisor is monitoring the call.) Oh, you're no longer giving your permission for the call to be recorded? Okay, I'll end the call right now, but everything said previously was still recorded legally as per the laws of my state, and there's not a damn thing you can do about it.
I just have no patience for companies that do business like this, and I really could not care less if it causes problems for the CSRs. It's not my job to be understanding and to make life easier for them. If I ask for an account to be cancelled, I neither expect nor want to be argued with. I understand the CSR will ask for a reason for the cancellation. I may give one, or I may not. I'm under no obligation to do so, and the CSR really needs to understand that - I personally look at such information as valuable business data that I'm not being paid to provide. His retention stats are not my problem. I will be polite until such time as the CSR begins to get uncooperative to my needs as a customer. Once that happens, I have no further obligation to be a decent human being and my generally cheery disposition will begin to degrade very quickly and not in a very graceful manner.Please stand clear of the doors, por favor mantenganse alejado de las puertas
I always use an MBNA ShopSafe generated credit card number for all Internet purchases, and some telephone purchases. After installing a small unobtrusive program on your computer (Windows only, alas), you then have the capability of generating a perfectly valid and unique credit card number with an expiration date and maximum credit limit chosen by you for that particular transaction. If I want to cancel an MBNA ShopSafe credit card number (which I can do at any time), all it takes is a couple of mouse clicks.
Does anyone know of any other banks with a similar service? I'm sure there must be some, and I'd like to have a backup handy in case MBNA is merged or goes belly up, etc.
9/11 Eyewitnesses to Explosive WTC Demolition 1 of 2
I used to do "retention" at an AOL call center and posted about it on Slashdot once last year. Go ahead, hate me. I deserve it. It's a crappy call center job that pays extremely well (50k a year for ordinary schmucks like the one in the recording and 70k+ if you're good) because it's so ugly what you have to do.
Let me tell you about AOL "retention". They have a mantra there "Saves attempts on every call". You will get written up and eventually fired if you don't try to run every single caller through their process they call "Member Connect". So the AOL employee in the recording, admittedly a really shitty example of a retention agent, had no choice but to make his 3 saves attempts no matter how adamant the caller is about "JUST CANCEL IT". People should make more of these recordings and shine some light on the shameful stuff they do there. It doesn't matter what your reason for canceling is, they have an answer and will attempt to close you with crude, but effective high pressure sales tactics.
"My computer's broke, I can't afford to buy another one and my phone was turned off. I need to cancel" - "No problem. You can actually use AOL from any computer work, school, library...
"The account holder was my father and he passed away so I need to cancel." - "I'm very sorry to hear about your dad that but since your name is not on the account you can't cancel it"
But mostly it's:
"I upgraded to broadband so I don't need AOL any more." - "Congratulations on your broadband! However, with your new high speed connection, your computer will be more vulnerable to viruses, hackers and identity thieves. AOL gives you the protection you need..."
Now here's where it really gets ugly: AOL makes a ton of money from people who accidentally create multiple accounts by running the disc over and over while trying to get online. So they call billing to complain about the multiple charges on their credit card a few months down the road. Billing and "Saves" are the same department now and if you tell them the truth about that they have multiple accounts you're going to have to cancel some accounts. So you deceive them by searching for the account by screen name only instead of payment method or telephone number in order to purposely not discover the additional accounts. Then you tell them that it must be their bank - "call your bank" - to get them off the phone without canceling anything.
You gotta understand that if you do the right thing and cancel the poor schmucks second and third accounts you're going to drag down your saves rate and your coach is going to be in your face telling you he's concerned about your saves rate. It's kind of sickening when the people your screwing over are little old ladies and inner city mothers with crying babies at their breasts.
Here's some lies I used to hear a lot on the floor:
"AOL was really slow." - "No problem! Just go to keyword: Top Speed and you can make it go five times faster!" Top Speed is the compression and caching that speeds up dial up a little and it's built into AOL. Going to that keyword just gives you a advertisement for something that is already present in the client. The reason it's so damn slow is all the ads that AOL pumps into everything they do. There's so many ads in AOL that they should give it away for free instead of $25.90 a month for crappy dialup ($30.90 if you don't have a credit card.)
"I'm having computer problems and have had bad experiences with your Indian tech support." - No problem! I'll transfer you to the "good" tech support located here in the US." There is no special tech support que that's only in the US, it's a lie. You just dump them back into the ordinary tech support que. And now days you have to sit through a long, painful session of talking to the IVR system before you even get to talk to the Indian tech support.
I good tell more but I'm getting sick thinking about it.
Also, telling your credit card company not to pay them will result in paper bills for the charges and if you don't pay those you'll get turned over for collection.
AOL doesn't make any money off of subscriptions. I'm just guessing, pulling shit out of my ass. I suspect however that their income is derived from their advertising and business partnership areas. AOL isn't an ISP, it's a BBS, started that way and nothing has changed. The big secret is that newspapers aren't being killed by the web and RSS, they are being killed by the new online newspapers.
AOL is the new online newspaper. Google, Yahoo! and MSN are all trying to become "portals", because portals are just electronic newspapers. They design the layout, pick the lettering and provide you with a digestible amount of ads and sales lines. It's not new media at all, it's the same damn thing. What do you read first thing in the morning? At lunch? The Internet has just given us newspapers that change on the fly and can actually work two ways. It's the same need, the same solution - information at hand. Entertainment, current events, comedy, debate, etc, it's all stuff we want and we get it somewhere.
Why do I say this? Look at the leading "homepages." A lot of people moved away from traditional portals like Yahoo or even Lycos to Google for a while, but now Google makes their own "home page" portal site because it "sticks" better (google.com/ig). Microsoft has made a huge technology jump from MSN.com to live.com, and could take a lead when Vista ships. The point is that all of these portals are fighting for your eyes so they can push ads or push you into doing business with their partners.
So what AOL is doing, and does, has a purpose. They don't even want to report you to collections. In fact, I'm sure they will overlook delinquencies when you are interested in signing up again. Free months so you don't cancel? Sure! No problem - don't even pay us if you don't want to. All they want is to have you come to them and request service. Cancel it in the first five minutes and you will easily get months free.
How can I say this? I work for a newspaper, in the circulation department. We aren't interested in the money people pay for the actual product. Even if all of our customers are delinquent we are happy - they are customers, we didn't "give away" the paper to them. In fact, at one time you could rack up hundreds of dollars in debt to us and we wouldn't bat an eye when you asked to get your paper restarted. (Now we are loosing money we can't afford that, they think) All that matters is that we can go the advertisers and say "we've got xxx,xxx people get the paper at home."
We always give away free "upgrades" to a customers subscriptions, not because it gets them to buy more papers, because they can be included in our daily circulation numbers. AOL is doing the same thing. Slashdot is even doing the same thing. Imagine if upon a six month Slashdot hiatus you decide to come back, what if then you've got mod points? Don't you think they are trying to get you to visit more to see more ads.
AOL is the newspaper, Slashdot is for us, CNN is for some, Yahoo is for some, MSN is for some, random-lusers-blog.com is another for one or two people. It all depends on the person. It isn't anything new, we've just got more options (and kick-ass search engines that can sift through it all).
Title should read: AOL Tries A Tactic From Every Other Media Provider's Business.
Get your Unix fortune now!
Don't cancel, just wander around the chat rooms saying you work for AOL and are a moderator of the forums until you find a real moderator and see how fast you get cut off permanantly. I suppose you could do some spamming as well.
I actually worked for AOL, in a different department, but we heard these stories hundreds of times, and I've personally reported them to the retention supervisors myself but if that call isn't recorded by AOL (only a small sample are recorded) then the consultant is given the benefit of the doubt. There are several supervisors who actually encourage you to do anything and I mean anything to hit your stats, but if you're caught, they deny it.
You got that right. I'm a recovering Dell service tech (2 weeks out of that hell hole) and the last new Dell I set up had 53 processes running right out of the box. Then you have the cheap 256 meg machines that paged out before the OS was even loaded. Add MS Office which had its preload crap in the startup folder and you got 7 minute plus boot times. Not to mention all the system/program pop-ups and time limited shareware upgrade notices they had to deal with. Many of these people were newbies or average users and just wanted to do email and browse the web. The crap was driving them nuts before I even got out of the house.
You and I would format the drive and reinstall but that's well beyond the capabilities of many of these users. Even the "Dell Decrapifier" is beyond most of them. And they're not about to spend $50 or $100 or whatever to have someone fix their new $500 computer.
Oh, and since this thread is about crappy service... In Information Week (6/12/06, pg 11) Paul English of Kayak.com says (in part) "Dell is in a customer service death spiral." That's being kind. I couldn't agree more. Virtually every customer (90%+) complained of long hold times, 4 to 6 hour or more troubleshooting sessions from brain dead techs or the guy named Sam or Fred that couldn't speak understandable english. Then when Dell did customer service surveys they'd complain LOUDLY and Dell would blame us because their shit didn't stink.
I had to deal with them even as an on-site tech. "The hard drive sounds like a coffee can full of rocks. I unplug it and the sound quits." "Well, lets run some diagnostics." "Huh? It's about to self destruct. Send me a GD drive!" "I can't until we run diagnostics." "But it isn't even seen in the BIOS." "You can run diagnostics off the Resource CD." And on and on and on. Or the poor woman who bought her 8400 to do work from home with a random reboot problem every few minutes. She spent 30+ hours on the phone over 6 months before they even sent a tech out. Then her warranty ran out between visits and they refused to help her any more. And the company I worked for that stressed customer service above all else refused to run it up the chain of command. Spineless assholes. I just couldn't do it any more.
Sorry, it wasn't you that set me off. It just looked like a good place to vent. Can you tell I'm glad I'm out?
I had the SAME thing happen to me. I tried to cancel my parent's account with AOL months ago and it took me no less than 3 separate calls to do it. The first AOL rep went so far as to LIE to me AFTER trying to convince her for fifteen minutes that I "truly" wanted to cancel it. She told me that she would give me two weeks just to "make sure." Then, she would "automatically" cancel the account. That was a blatant lie since I got yet another charge on my account the next month. When I called back fuming, they refused to cancel the account, even though I had the credit card it was originally purchased with and was age 19, until they got expressed consent from both me AND my parents. I suppose I can understand that, however the last call was truly absurd. My mother called telling them to cancel the account and the rep told her that "young kids like yours always lie about this sort of thing, he probably never called and want's to keep his email and account." My mom had to convince the AOL rep that I was not a hooligan.
AOL has an entire department dedicated to convincing people that they need to stay with AOL. The three separate employees all used high pressure techniques to keep us from canceling our account. These aren't the actions of individuals, but a company policy that breeds asinine and brash employees.
It's time for a class action law suit.
I find it refreshing when someone takes up the unpopular side of an arguement, and presents an interesting and unique point of view. Instead, it seems you've just ignored the basic rights of consumers to get what they pay for, and to cancel service at any time. If I drive into a mechanic's garage, and tell them to put their crappiest oil into my car, then they should damn well put in the crap oil. They can recommend I not do it, and say, "Are you sure? Is that your final answer?", or whatever, but if I get obviously upset after being quite polite for several minutes, they screwed up.
As for why people are uncomfortable talking to sales people, it's because that's part of how sales people are often trained. They make people uncomfortable, and use that to get sales. Here's an idea, if I want to buy something, I'll call them. Not to mention, this guy's not calling to buy something. He's done with it. He shouldn't need to talk to a sales rep, who's going to try to "sell" him on staying.
What's worse, where I live there seems to be an emerging policy with any service I pay for, that I need to give 30 days notice before the date I want service to stop. I can only assume that there's some law that was just passed that allows this, because I would think it to be legally dubious without specific exception.
The point is, this isn't about people's intolerance of sales people, this is about consumer rights. When someone wants to cancel a service, it should be cancelled. Period. And there's no way you can claim this guy didn't start out polite. He said "Please cancel the account" like 15 times before raising his voice, and never once cursed, or got personal.
--Not to be worried, Pitr fix.
I was a CSR and TSR for a few years while in college, so let me explain.
1. AOL probably has several call centers all over the USA and/or the world.
2. There are probably several Vincents.
3. Vincent might not be his real name, or might be his middle name, or he might go by the name Skippy to his peers. So nobody knows a Vincent at the call center.
4. How do we know he got fired? By whom? Aol outsources their call centers, don't they? Can AOL force a third party company running the call center to fire someone? Chances are that Vincent got a raise and promotion by the company he really works for (not AOL). Vincent sounds like a VERY GOOD CSR. At the call center I worked at (in Heathrow, FL), Vincent would have been made a team lead, if management heard that call. I'm really not kidding. Needless to say, I quit that job as soon as could, but damn the pay was GOOD!