If you leave me now…

A man named Vincent Ferrari is making headlines today. He called AOL’s costumer service to cancel his account and ran into a less than cooperative representative. The twist is, Vincent was taping the call and posted the recording on his blog.

This article from MSNBC.com quotes AOL’s response to the story. As expected the representative is blamed for “[violating] customer service guidelines and practices” and he is “no longer with the Company”. Puh-lease!

Given that AOL is literally hemorrhaging customers these days, is it hard to believe that the company would have an aggressive customer retention policy? Since Vincent posted his story a lot of people have come forward to relate similar experiences. Are we to believe that they all ran into a few bad apples?

My wife used to be a long time AOL customer. Back 4 or 5 years ago, when we decided to cancel her account, the customer service reps also tried very hard to retain our business. I’ve heard similar stories from friends or coworkers dating back years. If AOL was aggressively trying to hold on to customers back when it was doing pretty well, is it hard to believe it would be even more aggressive today?

As always the little guy takes the blame though. I’m not saying the rep didn’t violate some policy or guideline, but his behavior didn’t come out of the blue. Aggressive policies from management breed aggressive behavior. You see it all the time (look no further than your local car dealerships). Maybe AOL needs to come to terms with the fact that dial-up is a dying business. I don’t believe it will disappear overnight, but it is a market which is bound to get a lot smaller than it currently is. AOL should be hard at work looking for replacement income streams rather than pressuring departing customers to stay with them for a little while longer.

Comments

• Anonymous
  June 21, 2006
  Of course it is not surprising.
  
  They make you call to cancel so they can hassle you.
  While they say it is for YOUR security...they allow to totally sign up for the service online and not have any human interaction..but when you want to leave, you have to convince them that you are really the customer, and listen to them try to convince you to stay..
• Anonymous
  June 23, 2006
  It took me over 15 minutes to close my account last week. They asked all the same questions, they tried to offer me different programs, thay tried to lower my price and no matter what I said they would not give up. I must have said 25 times, I do not use your service anymore and I just want to close my account. They then pointed out the exact dates and the length of time I had been signed on in the last 3 months. And kept saying "well you used it today". YES to get email addresses off before I closed the account. "Well, you did use it today!" Frustrating and I will never go back!