WOW. Obstinate AOL rep won't cancel customer's account!

http://www.nbc10.com/news/9406462/detail.html#

On Tape: Rep Won't Let Customer Quit AOL

POSTED: 4:11 pm EDT June 21, 2006
UPDATED: 5:53 pm EDT June 21, 2006
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An incredible video from CNBC shows an AOL customer trying to cancel his account, but a phone rep won't let him do it. What customer Vincent Ferrari got when he tried to cancel his account was a lot of frustration.
It took him 15 minutes waiting on the phone just to reach a real, live person.
And, what happened next was recorded by Ferrari on audio and lasted about four minutes:






I knew AOL was bad, but this is ridiculous. WHy on earth do people sign up for that useless scam of non-service? What does it offer that you don't get with a regular ISP and browser? The mind reels.

he couldn't take thirty seconds to let the kid finish his script.

He knew what he wanted and the account should have been canceled immediately.

some shmuck answering customer calls for 8 bucks an hour deserves a break.

And it was a lot longer than 30 seconds, by the way...


And that was after 15 minutes on hold...

I saw this on Countdown, and I think it said 21 minutes just to cancel an unused account.

The caller was polite throughout, and the AOL guy was not doing a script in the audio at this link -- he was arguing and ignoring what the caller was saying and asking intrusive questions.

I have been through the exact same thing with AOL, but it was worse and took longer and the rep was rude, obnoxious, and insulting. In that case, he did eventually start reciting a script and I was not having that. I told him I didn't want to hear the script but he kept on, ignoring me every time I asked for the transaction number they assign when an an account is closed. I must have asked for that number thirty times and all he did was go back and start his script over. He did not give me the number until he got to the end of it. It was the worst experience I ever had with any company rep, bar none. He would have been fired mid-phone call if I had been his boss and overheard him.

And before anyone gives me a hard time about subscribing to that steaming shitpile of a service, keep in mind that I was traveling and AOL was the only network that had dial-in lines everywhere (this was before broadband in hotel rooms).

Want an even funnier experience? Try calling AOL's tech support. "Okay, sir...is the computer plugged in? Is the computer turned on?" Jesus.

and, although techs hate to ask, those are actually fairly standard and occasionally legit questions. You'd be amazed at how often he'd go into a BANK on a call for a non-working/malfunctioning ATM and find (even after asking if the machine was plugged in/turned on) that the machine was unplugged or not powered up.

There are also times when a machine will become unplugged without the person operating it knowing. Some folks think before going into a tizzy... others go into a tizzy and call tech. :)

Dear old Dad did radio/radar repair for the air force. When called to the flight line by a pilot with a bad radio, the first thing they did was check to make sure the power was on, the second was to make sure that the headphones were plugged in...

Simple request. When I cancel an account, I don't want someone analyzing my usage of the account in an attempt to talk me out of it.

is an interface that most members of the reptile family could navigate, and less money in your pocket.

Remember, you cannot spell Asshole without AOL.

Obviously no one at NBC 10 has ever dealt with AOL. This is SOP — you call to cancel and they try to talk you out of it, then offer you one or two free months of "service."

Nothing "incredible" about this. It's just the way AOL works.

(I think Comp-U-Serve is possibly under the same parent company as their browser is eerily similar to AOhEll's, and they have very similar products. Comp-U-Serve is just cheaper and a little watered down by comparison. )

When I went to cancel each service I had to sit through spiels about "why do you want to cancel, what sort of things to you do when you surf the Internet, here's what we have to offer, we'll give you X hours/months free if you stay with us, blah blah blah". It was like pulling teeth to get them to finally understand that I wasn't going to take their deal no matter what they said or how many times they said it.

ruin our credit rating.

"I don't use your service-- I haven't used it for several months. I am not going to pay for something I'm not using."

Then he went into a rant about wrecking our credit rating.

Horrible service and horrible employees -- this was a few years ago.

I sent a letter to the State Attorney General. And no . . . they didn't destroy our credit rating.

Some of these ISPs are scary! I realize those people are "only doing their jobs", but maybe they need to get different jobs if being such vultures is what their jobs require. I had SurfBest for several years until I started having problems with them (I'd have problems getting online for 24 hour stretches several times a month). I called to cancel them and got no guff at all--it was totally painless. I'd never use AOhEll or CompuServe again because of the way they acted when I went to cancel. :scared:

I just canceled mine and they offered me free cows, their first born, and all kinds of stuff. it took about 20 minutes and in the end I said I am going to the bank tomorrow and stopping the automatic withdrawel and she got pissed off and hung up.

You would think that after this recent stuff they would stop with the high pressure, I sure hope everyone calls and cancels now. If for no other reason than the exporting of jobs taking advantage of cheap labor. I should have done this long ago.

Damn he was bad! I think I would have choked him. All he had to do was cancel the account. He could said his script earlier.

I was not as aggressive as the caller, so I wound up sitting
through 10-15 minutes of hard sell before I finally conviced
the customer rep to close the account.

When I called AOL to cancel, my exchange was something like this:

ME: I'd like to cancel my account.

REP: I'm sorry to hear that. Can I ask why?

ME: I don't use AOL. I have broadband.

REP: Let me look at your account. I see you haven't logged on.
Can I offer you free trial minutes to see what we have to offer.

ME: I have broadband. I have no use for AOL.

REP: What do you mean you have no use for AOL. Everybody has a use for something.

ME: Please close the account.

REP: Okay, I'm processing your request. This will take a while.
While we are waiting, please consider AOL for broadband.

ME: Just close the account!

REP: What do you use to browse the internet with?

ME: Mozilla. (Maybe I should have told him that I used Linux.)

REP: What's Mozilla?
.
.
.
ME: All I want is for you to close the account.

We went round and round on this for at least 10 minutes.

The Federal Trade Commission supposedly lowered the boom on them
for these practices years ago. I see that AOL is back up to old tricks.

It took me months for them to cancel AOL. I had been given a free trial and couldn't cancel it. I probably should have made a bigger stink about it at the time but I just vowed to tell everyone I knew how bad they were.

I had a free trial for AOL Music (I'm not a regular subscriber) and it took me over half an hour to cancel it. The first guy pretended he couldn't find my information, and eventually hung up on me. I called back loaded for bear, and finally got some action. It was ridiculous the hoops they made me jump through.

Little did you know that the hours were consecutive.

I fell for the free trial scam and they ended up charging my credit card. When I called them about it, the rep started yelling at me that I was a liar, I was told it was consecutive, blah, blah, blah (they told me none of this) and they would not remove the charge. I opened an inquiry with my credit card company and the charge was removed shortly afterward. I swore that I would never do business with them again.

account we had with them over the "final straw" of them selling ways to get around my spam settings they were pushier then usual.

As for why do people sign up... it's easy. Years ago you couldn't get AIM without AOL and the kids loved that and the chat rooms... it was the "in" place to be. For adults they actually had rather fun and educational chat rooms as well and AOL had an easy way to set your kids up with a name of their that was geared towards their age group.

Until not that long ago we had AOL (since 1993 & mostly BYOA so it was used more as sort of an extra browser). Everything went to our email addies there, we liked the spam filters and there was a chat room we used to enjoy so that even once the kids were grown up and gone it took time and things changing to where we were no longer comfortable with AOL to wean us off of it... only to find out that we could still get mail/AIM with our old names/addies if we wanted to and for free. ::sigh::

AOL gave them all kinds of shit when they cancelled their account last year. For myself, AOl tried to charge me for a free trial account I had tried out 4 years ago :argh: I had my bank stick them good for that shit.

...know a single one who has anything nice to say about AO-hell.
We techs hear stories CONSTANTLY about how shitty AOL is about canceling accounts.
It's just standard operating procedures for the bastards..

Also....their Bloated lousy software has screwed up more computers than I care to remember...

Here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CvVp7b5gzqU&search=comcast