This is the quickly-becoming-famous audio recording of a customer trying to cancel his AOL account. (Click on the pic to listen.) Guess which retail store this AOL rep reminds me of.
And then there’s this nugget (Chron.com):
[Nicholas] Graham, the AOL spokesman, did not apologize about the company’s deliberate decision to deny customers the option to cancel with a click of a button online. The calls to cancel provide AOL with an opportunity to lead customers to services or features they had not known about, enabling them, Graham said, to “find their Eureka moment” or to accept a tempting offer of a lower price.
Uh huh.
Related Link: NBC10.com (Transcript is here.)
Not surprised. AOL caters to the lowest common denominator in online users, those who have the least computer knowledge. So I guess this type of tactic must work on those types.
Another Ballys… another Circuit City. {sigh}
I had similar with Telmex Prodigy, Mexico’s telco and largest ISP. The only way to cancel was a long conversation with a gentleman speaking very fast Spanish (at least you know that the call centre isn’t in India!). OK, I speak Spanish, but it was getting tedious. After about five plans that he explained to me, I said Just cancel it. He said, but you haven’t heard me out. The utterly unbelievable thing was that the last plan he offered me was actually quite good (for me). No monthly charge, 9 pesos per hour dialup. As he put it: just like an internet cafe in your own home. Way better than $20 a month for a dialup that wasn’t used much. The plan was called “Prodigy Por Minuto.”
But let me guess. There is no AOL Por Minuto.
AOL was available ONLY on a per-minute basis prior to the fall of 1996.
AOL was my very first ISP – I signed on in March 1996 and paid almost $1200 for my first six months online, including a bill for $365 for a single month.
This story reminded me that I needed to call AOL and cancel a free subscription that had come with a Laptop I purchased a couple months ago. To my surprise, I simply had to step through some phone prompts, speaking my security answer and I managed to cancel the account in 4 minutes without actually talking to a live person.
Poor Guy — They asked for His Dad. When will AOL go the way of Compuserve.
I miss my BBS, and downloading Commander Keen for 2 hours over 9600 baud. Those were the days.
Had a very similar experience but these guys are trained to deal with customers this aggresively.
Ah, Ben. Don’t get them started on “in the old days…”
“Why I remember when we used those damned punch cards to…”
“Punch cards? We had to enter each bit of each instruction in with toggle switches on the front of the compu…”
“You wimps! I remember having to actually do math problems BY HAND!”
Since we’re taking a walk down memory lane, I remember my first “online” experiences were on BBS boards also…started with, get this, 300 baud only boards. I thought 1200 baud was like WHOA!
I went with the BBS up through 14,440 baud and things were cool. Then this upstart company in Chicago called Interaccess was offering monthly based payment to hook up to the Internet. Back then, the Internet mainly consisted of IRC, Usenet, Telnet, FTP sites and Gopher. Oh, and this new kid on the block called the World Wide Web….but we all thought it was a flash-in-the-pan and would never catch on.
Ok, I never said I was a visionary. But it was fun back in the Wild West days of the Internet…way way WAY before it went commercial.
AOL = Army of Lamers
I know folks who have gone to a broadband connection and STILL pay for it since “it’s too hard to tell all of my friends/family my new email address”. Yeah, right, you just get off on that “you have mail” message.
When I cancelled AOL back in January 1998, they were actually very straightforward and polite. My only complaint is that they closed the account a little too quickly – in a matter of hours rather than days or weeks, and I didn’t get a chance to save some of my emails (AOL mail is saved on the AOL server rather than the user’s computer), and to send my new email to all of my contacts.
yeah, saw this last night… and I work doing tech support for a major telecom company – if I saw a rep doing this, they’d get fired on the spot.
woot! GO AOL, alienate your customer base even faster!
I guess they are getting desperate. The mom with the baby in the boardroom with nametag ad didn’t work, the stupid joe six pack olympic ads (“don’t want to blow a hammy”) ads didn’t work. So I guess now they figure they won’t let anyone leave and they will be ok. Sad, very sad. I laugh when anyone gives me an email address ending in aol.com
I have to say, I just cancelled AOL after over 12 years of service, and although they tried to offer incentives to keep me, they weren’t pushy at all. They also let me keep my e-mail addresses for free for life. But, I’ve heard of many similar horror stories, and I warn all of my friends who decide to cancel to be prepared!
“They also let me keep my e-mail addresses for free for life.”
The AOL e-mail address is free for anyone who uses AIM. You never even have to be a suscriber.
Maybe I’m an elitist snob. Maybe I’m just a jack ass. I don’t care what you think.
I’m very tolerant of almost everyone’s weird quirks or interests or lifestyle. I don’t care if you are black or white or olive. Gay, straight, or, no difference to me.
Are you an SCA nerd? Okay by me. Do you have a profile on Collarme.com? I’m hip. Do you own North America’s largest private collection of Beanie Babies? Everyone needs a hobby.
Hell, I’ll even drink with Republicans.
But if a resume crosses my desk with an AOL email address… that person will not be hired. No exceptions.
#4, Frank, I remember those days. I see you found that out there was even a lot of free porn back then. LOL.
About three years ago I had an AOL account as I had to do a little traveling and couldn’t access the company servers. When I went to cancel the account, I ran into the same hassles. When I called back to complain to a supervisor, he saw no problem. Needless to say, they still billed my account the next month. When I called to complain about that, they offered me three months of free service instead. As I had spent more time on the phone then what the account cost, I just let it alone.
All this wandering down memory lane has me thinking about my C64 days on Compuserve. good times. good, slow, times.
But anyway – I had the identical experience as #17 when I axed AOL back in the 90s. call and cancel, get billed anyway, and they are remarkably unapologetic about it when you call and complain.
Yup, I figured I was not alone. The guy I talked to today while trying to cancel my service treated me like I was a moron and even told me “Don’t say I didn’t warn you!” when I refused to continue some sort of ‘server protection’ service that he insisted I must have and couldn’t get anywhere else. I had to tell him no three times and he got increasingly aggressive on each bid. What a jerk! I can’t imagine anyone ever going back to AOL after being treated so rudely.