Also, you are incredibly gullible. In the possibilities on your list, John lying to Vincent is present, but it is dead last. If I ran a business and had no sense of ethics, I’d certainly want you for a customer…
Your best guess is that John was telling the truth about the infamous 545 hours usage and that Vincent was lying. This company’s apparent SOP is to continue to take money from customer account after the customer has canceled, as has been shown by state Attorneys General. Do you really assume a morally bankrupt company that drains checking accounts trains their CSRs to be honest with their callers? Or would fire them for lying to the customer? If they are trained to keep the customer on the phone as long as possible and frustrate them enough in the hopes that they hang up in a “save”, arguing with the customer about hours usage is one of many ways to do it.
On one side we have AOL’s long-time underhanded practices as a matter of public record, on the other we have Vincent who, through his public appearances has likely saved many fence-sitters from subscribing to AOL to begin with (thereby giving them back hours of their lives because they will never be subjected to a customer service call contrived to waste that life). I, and thousands of others, know which of the two have provided the greatest “service.”

And thanks for that service, Vincent. With every public appearance resulting in a non-subscriber or a cancellation, it’s a small slice of rarely-seen justice. Cheers to you!

We need to raise money for the guy who was fired for doing what he was trained to do.

Let’s help prime the pump. AOL’s probably thinking about hush money, or about getting this guy out of the country. Or worse.

If one million AOL victims donated $5 each, we can start offering AOL witnesses & former employees enough to retire on. In exchange for testimoney. Bonuses for convictions of management.

Crazy. Absolutely crazy.

Read: “Punished by Rewards” by Alfie Kohn, and “The New Economics” and “Out of the Crisis” by W. Edwards Deming.

Is someone writing a book, or developing a documentary on this stuff (that is, AOL’s absurd and tragic business practices)? The time to do interviews is now, before it goes under. The best thing to come out of this would be a lot of learning — just like we all learned from Enron.

Would love to do an interview with you tomorrow. (Monday). Please give me an email back so we can set up a time- Thanks!

-Guy Bauer
WLUP-FM – Chicago

Your post and others like it tell the real tale while RJ desperately tries to put whipped cream on a turd.

Its hard for me to put this in words because you would need to understand more of the “culture” of AOL to understand why I sympathize with John. Your call was nothing compared to some of the calls I have had or heard. If you feel like you were redeemed by what happened to John then you lost because he had lost his job before you thought to call in to cancel your account. Scott Falconer did nothing for you the department in AZ is officially laid off as of June 30th. I am so ashamed it took this to happen to make corporate see the errors of their ways. I’m sure they will say John was a fluke of nature when this is what consistently happens. Corporate piles mountains of expectations on all of its CSRs across the board. I’m in tech support I am given one bonus a month based on MSI, Smart Transfer (sales crap), HSIO (more sales crap), sign on duration, schedule adherence, lost time, idle time, and call time. In order for me to bonus well I need you off my phone in 10 minutes or less and its very difficult to do this. MSI is Member Satisfaction Index. The survey is all about my ability to assist you. We would all get great MSI’s if we could really take the time to resolve your issue but we lose bonus money because of the call time not to mention you could lose your job. So if you ever call tech support and someone sounds hurried you know. Anyone who works on the phone at AOL knows it is a no win situation.

Vinyl if you had not recorded that call a supervisor at AOL would have seen it as a coaching opportunity to help John find better ways to draw out hidden concerns. I am planning on leaving AOL very soon this whole situation has sickened me immensely. I talk to an average of 40 people a day. The majority of my calls begin with I had to wait this long amount of time to get to you, the automated system sucks, and I hope you are American. There is nothing we can do to change it corporate has never listened to its CSR. If we ask why they would tell us its none of our business we don’t need to know. If we say something is wrong they say it will not change. They never cared until it was to late. I wasted 10 years on this pathetic, incompetent company. I’m cashing out on my stock and bailing this burning ship.

rock on Vinny…don’t listen to the trolls.

You sound (and no doubt are) as kind and competant as 99.99% of all of the CSR’s i’ve ever interacted with. And I interact with a lot. I’m of the old school and prefer to do most of my business with a person over the phone, rather than handle it on-line. And truth be told, I actually enjoy it.

Cancelling AOL was horrendous! I felt verbally assaulted after I hung up with them!!!! It wasn’t until after I cancelled that I researched this and found many horror stories similar to mine. I was shocked!

If this story had been about any other company…I would really just chalk it up to…”someone was having a bad day” be it CSR or Customer (you can usually tell who ends up being the beligerant one)….but the moment I heard “AOL Cancelation”…..

Paul is correct also. The long winded debates above between RJ and Vinny, prove, all by themselves, RJ respects himself NOT the customer. Defensive instruction to a paying customer is not honoring the customer. RJ needs further training/instruction on listening, as Vinny so aptly pointed out here. As consumers, we ALL need wisdom…not training in interaction with the people we are paying for a service or a product by a CSR!!

To suggest otherwise is arrogant. Vinny’s recording passes wisdom on to all of us!

“Death to AOL!” bumper stickers.

(More direct than “AOL sucks,” don’t you think?)

AOL is supposed to serve the customer, not the other way around. Your entire call would have taken under 30 seconds at any company with good customer service. You said nothing rude until it was clear that being civil was getting you nowhere.

And BTW, just like another commenter above, AOL also asked to see my father’s death certificate when I was trying to cancel the account, which they had billed to my mother (who used the same card) for several months after his death. They argued that under their terms of service (sic), they didn’t owe a refund. I said BUT HE IS DEAD! HE DIED SEVERAL MONTHS AGO, AND YOU AND I BOTH KNOW THE ACCOUNT HASN’T BEEN USED!

When a big company is INTENTIONALLY screwing over your 80 year old mother and refuses to stop………

Well, I’ve never been as mad in my life. Not by a long shot.

I hope your press coverage costs them many million dollars. (I also hope their headquarters gets hit by a meteor, but I’m not holding my breath for that one.)

I must ask: Why hasn’t AOL trained people the way Cindy has been trained?!?!? Imagine if AOL had “pounded into” its employees that you HONOR THE CUSTOMER’S REQUEST — period. That is exactly the opposite of what AOL has done. Maybe AOL isn’t as much of a “repeat business” business as an airline, but they still have a REPUTATION to be concerned about. A bad reputation can bring down a company, and may yet do just that with AOL. I personally have told tons of people my own AOL cancelling horror story, and have otherwise made it less likely to people will stay, join, or re-join AOL, or feel good about the brand known as AOL or America Online. By attempting to “save” or “retain” me — instead of respecting me and listening to me — AOL did vastly more damage than if they had said, “Sure, I’ll get that cancellation set up right away” (or better yet, allow me to cancel online).

Think about this: AOL could have had a quick, simple online procedure (with a very reasonable security verification) for cancellation, and instead of keeping, what, hundreds (thousands?) of people on the payroll to be in “the retention department,” COULD HAVE PUT THESE SAME PEOPLE TO WORK TO, INSTEAD, IMPROVE THE PRODUCT AND/OR FIGURE OUT WAYS TO BRING DOWN COSTS FOR THE CUSTOMER and/or branch out into other businesses. The whole company would be “the retention department.” That is: You retain customers by treating them well, and respecting all of their decisions, and having basic empathy (and realizing that AOL is not a charity, and people have absolutely no obligation to support it). With such a culture in place, everyone would have been happier: the customer, the employees, and the shareholders.

I suggest this axiom: If a company has to have a “retention department,” (or, God forbid, “save” quotas), the company has a bad product.

If customers are quitting in droves, you have a bad product. You are not meeting the needs of the market.

Better to fix the product, or sell other products.

The time for exploring is when an irate complaint call comes in. You can see my sweet smile right through the phone….and I won’t let them hang up until they’re smiling right back at me!