| One way or another....... .....companies will pay for bad customer service.
Holding onto unhappy customers will cost you more in the long run than if you just let them go. |
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| Of course, the three million is a drop in the bucket compared to the money AOL probably made by making cancellation a living hell, |
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 SlidetboneMazin GoPremium
join:2002-11-10
Land O Lakes, FL | AOL isn't the only company doing this. Many service and wireless providers are using this tactic. AOL just so happens to be in the sights of so many that booed their service. But little do people know is that we owe what the internet is today due to the strategies of AOL. It gave many folks an easy way to get online.
Bash me all you want, but look at yourself in the mirror and tell yourself "I never used AOL" and watch your nose grow!  |
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 pnh102Reptiles Are Cuddly And PrettyPremium
join:2002-05-02
Mount Airy, MD | said by Slidetbone:Many service and wireless providers are using this tactic. This practice is prevalent in the credit card industry as well. The last credit card that I cancelled over the phone, back in 2002, took 3 hours of my time (thank goodness for speakerphones). For credit cards at least, I have had to change my tactics. I simply mail a letter instructing the credit card company to cancel my account to the account's service (not billing) address. This has worked both times that I have tried it.
Perhaps this method might also work with ISPs, especially if such a letter is sent via Certified Mail with some sort of delivery confirmation.
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Only SHATNER is Kirk. |
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| reply to Slidetbone
said by Slidetbone:Bash me all you want, but look at yourself in the mirror and tell yourself "I never used AOL" and watch your nose grow! I never used AOL.
(Waits for it...)
Nope. My nose is still the same size. |
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 MrMoodyFree range slavePremium
join:2002-09-03
Smithfield, NC | reply to Slidetbone
I never used AOL, not even once. I had heard too many horror stories. I went straight from BBSs to dialup direct internet and Mosaic. |
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 Mactronel Camino RealPremium
join:2001-12-16
CM94sv | reply to moonpuppy
"three million is a drop in the bucket compared to the money AOL probably made by making cancellation a living hell"
A slap on the hand, nothing more. 
The AOL Lawyers earned their pay big time. 
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If only the Verizon CSRs worked this well.  |
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 RARPSL
join:1999-12-08
Suffern, NY | reply to Slidetbone
Re: One way or another....... said by Slidetbone:But little do people know is that we owe what the internet is today due to the strategies of AOL. While that is true, I'd be happier if AOL at least did not treat the Internet (and its users) as second class citizens compared to ITS users and provided the same email functionality to email sent to and/or received from the Internet as that which is created on the AOL side of the Email gateway and sent to another AOL user.
Examples of the failure to support Internet Email correctly include:
1) An attempt to request a RR gets silently ignored for mail addressed to an Internet address as opposed to inserting RRT and DNT headers into the created RFC2822 format email.
2) An Internet Email that has a RRT and/or DNT header has it ignored as it passes into the AOL Email system and does not have the AOL Email RR flag set (so a RR can be sent back to the sender as would occur if the Email was created on the AOL side in the first place).
3) An Internet Email that has more than one attachment gets converted into a MIME Format attachment file of the full RFC2822 message and attached to a Boilerplate message saying (in effect) "We refuse to handing multiple attachments correctly and it is your job to unMIME the data in this attachment which contains the message as it was delivered to our Gateway". A message created on the AOL side would have an Archive attachment containing all the files. The gateway is just DELIBERATELY configured/designed to not create this archive (the Internet User must do it for AOL to get it delivered/converted correctly).
4) Talking about an Archive attachment, if a message is created on the AOL side and sent to the Internet, the Gateway does not pass the attachment as-is but expands it and appends it to the message body (at least if it is Text or HTML).
5) Trying to fetch a message with attachment via IMAP gets the same mangling as 4 above.
6) Trying to submit a multi-attachment message via AOL's SMTP MSA Servers addressed to an AOL address gets the same malformed AOL message as in 3 above.
I could go on but this type of DELIBERATE mishandling of Internet Email is par for the course with AOL. |
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| reply to pnh102
I tried to cancel 2 cards in one day due to membership fees. One refunded the fee and the other cancelled with no problem.  |
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| reply to Slidetbone
said by Slidetbone:Bash me all you want, but look at yourself in the mirror and tell yourself "I never used AOL" and watch your nose grow! I never used AOL, but I did cancel my 10+ year Compuserve account a few years after AOL bought them out and it became obvious that they were using CIS as a cash cow.
Compuserve's one main asset was their forum software. I remember a CIS manager blowing me off when I called to ask if they would consider licensing that software to companies for internal use. Wonder what he's doing these days... |
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| reply to Slidetbone
I never used AOL Service
I DID use the coasters they sent in the mail |
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