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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!"
Which is why I advise people to threaten to get lawyers involved at the first sign that the phone drone isn't going to comply.
"Oh my God. This is terrible. This is the end of my Presidency. I'm fucked."; ~ Donald J. Trump
What would you expect if you came up to a bank teller, gave her your ATM card, and started screaming: Bitch, give me the money, just give me the money, give me the money. Help me by giving me the money?
Vincent sounds like a silver-spoon teenager with an attitude. He probably does the same thing when his folks buy him a Lexus instead of a BMW.
Instead of 'cancel the account' hysterics (you can almost hear this guy's forced crying and foot-stomping) he should have cooperated with the AOL rep and had his account settled in less than 5 minutes.
There are many many reasons why customer rep acted the way he did:
1) A whinny teenager cancelling parents' account on a whim might not be in parents' best interests.
2) Given most AOLers are computer 'newbies', the user may have meant: 'recall the last email', 'help me fix parental control', 'I need to change my dialup prefix', or any number of things...
3) His story did not agree with the usage pattern: probably would turn out to be nothing, or could turn out to be some heavy-shit hacking, with crying Vincent leashed up in Gitmo for messing with the nuclear launch codes...
4) He could be a prankster trying to highjack someone else's account:
&c &c.
Unfortunately, the asshole Vincent got famous, and the AOL rep got fired
I am not a psychiatrist, but I would prescribe a can of whoop-ass for the little bitch twice daily, until he grows up and learns exactly how to be a functional society member.
Obama likes poor people so much, he wants to make more of them.
...there may have been more to this than meets the eye. The rep claimed to have observed 545 hours of usage in the past month, yet the person claimed to have not used the account for years. It seems to me his whole line of questioning is just to get to the bottom of that inconsistency. Given that alot of AOL users don't know the difference between their computer and the internet, it's quite possible this rep was talking to someone who used AOL everyday for years and simply didn't realize it (could EASILY have been my mom). He may simply have been trying to save the guy a lot of aggravation due to interrupted service, lost email, etc. If the caller would have just listened to the rep make his point, he might have ended the call alot sooner.
In general, I don't understand people who are so uncomfortable talking to salespeople that they have to resort being rude. Imagine the salesman was this guy's neighbor--would he still not have let him finish a sentence? No; that would be rude. Why is it acceptable to do that to a salesperson? Are they not humans too?
You could have just waited until someone posted it on the front page, here, you know. It was just matter of time, now that it's been on Digg.
"If you make people think they're thinking, they'll love you; But if you really make them think, they'll hate you." - DM
AV generally can't find root kits & if you aren't using Linux or Mac(?) you're vulnerable to root kits.
Jaysyn
There is a war going on for your mind.