Bad Behavior at AOL

One of the areas that I study and teach about is customer service.  I did a lot of my early research on jobs that require people to express certain emotions and suppress others, including telephone bill collectors, 7/Eleven clerks, and police interrogators. I’ve become more interested in service experiences again in the last year or so, and in fact, a group of us including Michael Dearing (who just left eBay after over six years as a senior executive), Perry Klebahn (inventor of the modern snowshoe and a former Patagonia executive), Liz Gerber (a fantastic Stanford doctoral student and skilled product designer) and I are developing a new Stanford d.school class on designing service experiences next Fall. And Huggy Rao of the Stanford Business School and I are teaching a new executive program next November on Customer-Focused Innovation.

My renewed interest in services is driven heavily by the bewildering and often idiotic things that organizations to do us as customers.  I won’t do the complete rant here, but I’ve had some experiences with Air France that were simply unbelievable blends of arrogance and incompetence, for example.  One experience was so bad that I really couldn’t figure out how to get them to pay attention to me without having a strategic temper tantrum (an incident I describe in my chapter on the virtues of assholes in The No Asshole Rule).  But the experience I had with Air France was nothing compared to the treatment that an AOL customer received when he tried to cancel his account. Go to Insignificant Thoughts and listen to the audio of the poor guy who was trying to cancel his account.  The entire company owes this guy an apology. When I hear something like this, my reaction is “now that is a company that deserves to die.”

Comments

[carl hilton]

AOL/ Maybe/ my grandson typed in the word"mudda" ie by itself. aol discontinued my service on 19 oct 2005. the service rep. was in India. i paid monthly by EFT/ payable on the first of the month. when the EFT didn't go through they obtained a CC number from Bank America,annnd charged me for oct/nov/dec/jan/feb/mar/april/may/jun and etc. i talked to the folks at Bank america and the card was cancelled. they still want that 29.95 for the month i paid for and the other months AFTER they sent me a letter dtd 29 oct 2005 stating the service was cancelled.. i have a comment in russian for AOL and it is """YO?TUUVE?YO?MOT..

[Bill]

Aol customer no service department are actually "retention" specialists who are compensated on customers retained.