AOL cleaning up their act re cancellations

Sorry I forgot to save a link for this -- but it was in My Yahoo's Reuters Technology headlines this morning.

And of course if there's a better home for this, as usual feel free to move it appropriately.

AOL has settled with New York State in regard to their handling of members trying to cancel, and some interesting new info came to light about how a good chunk of this well-known problem got started in the first place.

Apparently AOL had offered "incentives" to its cust-service reps for each member they "discouraged" from cancelling, and also had a quota system in effect for cancellations.

According to the article, as part of the settlement agreement AOL will "modify its incentives system", and will drop the quotas entirely. Presumably this only applies within New York, but it will certainly give other jurisdictions a fresh look at what's been happening.

 

Mike, I knew they'd be cornered sooner or later. I've told the story about how it took practically a year to get them to stop billing my credit card when I quit.

Well, naturally, I filed complaints about them. I'd saved written confermations from them of my cancellation, but still they would charge me again...anyway I was furious at the time, but about a year ago it stopped...

...until...

Just a couple months ago I received a letter from them telling me I was still a valued customer. In order to confirm my cancellation, I was advised to send this and that confirmation about myself...At this point I just laughed and threw it away. What an obvious ploy to harvest (former) customer data for marketing efforts!

Go NY!


- HandsOff