someday when you calm down you’ll realize all I was trying to do is help you
Holy God — this is the company that was big enough to buy Time Warner a couple years ago? And they’re reduced to harassing their customers one by one?
~jeff
Holy God — this is the company that was big enough to buy Time Warner a couple years ago? And they’re reduced to harassing their customers one by one?
I thought Dwight Schrute worked for Dunder-Mifflin.
Zing?
reduced??
I think they have perfected phone groveling.
I too have been through the pain … of breaking up (I did it to get a $100 amazon gift certificate) .. .and even telling them that I never loved them was a very painful process.
As an AOL phone rep I can tell you that there is no “incentive” to keep customers. The rep was trying to make sure that Vincent wasn’t an idiot before cancelling his account. Some people don’t realize that they are using AOL even when it’s their primary internet connection. As in “I don’t need AOL because I use Internet Explorer.” Then they cancel their account and regret it. The rep was being lazy and sticking to the script too closely but I believe his heart was in the right place. He should get a raise.
I don’t know about AOL, but I actually talked to a guy who used to manage Earthlink call center once. He told me that while there was no monetary incentive for call operators to keep customers, the performance reviews did include a saved-to-lost customer ratio.
In other words, they get paid whether or not they convince the customer to stay, but if they lost more than a half of the customers they might not get a raise and etc.. This of course might be bullshit, but that’s what I heard.
From personal experience: I actually had to once cancel 50 Earthlink accounts that my company was using for field employees. For some reason they did not set up any business account – they were just setting up regular accounts under my bosses name as they hired new people.
I kinda went through the same call routine, but the guy on the other end of the line had a thick Indian accent. He was actually really nice and didn’t give me any attitude, like that AOL guy. But then again I just indulged him and went along with the script and even joked around with him, and engaged in some small talk..
It kinda went like this – he would ask me for a reason, and I would tell him that we found another dialup service that charges $5 a month. He would propose to give me 5 different discounts and I would refuse each of them. Then he would go through the disclaimer note, and cancel the account.
Rinse and repeat for the next account. 3 hours and around 8 accounts later I asked him if he really wants to go through the script for the rest of the day. Because I was actually getting paid for sitting there and saying “no thank you” to him all day.
He gave up, and promised to cancel the rest of them without me having to confirm each of them.
Of course he fucked up and canceled my bosses blackberry service as well, but that’s a whole different story.
What did I learn from this story? If you indulge them, and patiently go through the script they will have no other choice but to cancel your account. It’s also worth it to tell them really long and boring stories about how your cousins, brother’s friend who you know from college, told you about that good dialup service that one time at band camp.
If you make it long and confusing enough they are likely to interrupt you, just to make you shut up. Once it is established in their mind that you will rant at length when given an opportunity they might be reluctant to give you any follow-up questions.
AOL has been on a downward spiral for years now. The worst thing they did was buy TimeWarner. They should’ve stayed independent and use the overpriced stock (at the time) to fund operations.
I saw that this weekend, and forwarded it to the people I thought would be interested. It turns out 3 out of the 7 people had similar experiences when they tried to cancel.