I have just gotten off the phone with the rudest little person I have ever had the displeasure of dealing with. “Randy” would not give me his employee number or a last name or anything to report. He works in the billing department at 888-265-8003. I called to contest a bill to my account and to request not to be billed further. I have cancelled my account. He would not let me talk to anyone different, but told me I needed to hang up and call back. He said I could not contest my bill. He said that it was too bad and I would just have to live with the bill to my account. I beg to differ. Never in my life have I been treated so rudely, with absolutely no way of contacting a real person to deal with. I cannot believe this is aol’s idea of customer service. I am GLAD not to EVER have to deal with this service again and I will be sure to tell EVERY computer using person about this incident. As far as I’m concerned, you stole money from my bank account and I am feeling robbed. I will tell my bank to decline any charges that aol tries to make on my account. It seems as though there’s nothing an individual can do to complain. My work number is -------- if someone would like to APOLOGIZE to me about this situation.
The most frustrating thing about this sort of service is that there’s very little you can do from the other end of a phone line. There’s no way in hell that Randy was his real name, especially given that he refused to give you a last name or employee number, or talk to anyone else.
I’m not a violent person, but when i get this sort of treatment i just want to reach down the phone and strangle the fuckers. You can all back and complain, but you will no doubt be told that “There is no Randy in this call center.”
What really irks me is that, almost every time you call one of these organizations, they tell you that “This call may be monitored for quality purposes.” Why does this never to seem to happen when your call is a nightmare like the OP’s? I think what they really mean is “This call may be monitored in case you say something that we can contradict you on later.” No-one seems to give a fuck about how the customer is actually treated by the call center employee.
My MIL had a similar rude encounter with AOL just the other day. She called to cancel her service, and the guy started giving her shit for it!!! She was lucky enough to get a confirmation number on the cancellation, but when she asked him to repeat it, HE hung up on HER!!!
My husband had problems with AOL two years ago. He had cancelled his service, and they kept billing him (pulling it out of his checking account), and they kept offering him more “free” service. NO, DAMMIT!! WE ARE CANCELLING YOUR CRAPPY-ASS SERVICE!!! We don’t want to use AOL even if YOU paid US!!!
Yesssss, those AOHell bastards are skilled at being rude, trying to push off their free hours in a (lame) attempt to get you to stick with their (lame) service and giving people the run around. Damn them all to hell. When I canceled my words to them were, “NO! I do NOT want 10,000,000 more free hours. I do NOT want to give AOHell a 90th try, I do not feel like discussing why I want to cancel anymore. AOHell is the worst ISP EVER and I refuse to be an AOLoser anymore. I am CANCELLING! Period!” Yeesh. I should not have to go through all this just to cancel my service. Arrr.
It’s like they won’t “let” you cancel. They just keep charging your credit card. Damn. I guess I will have to let the bank know I don’t plan on paying aol another dime.
Ha! Lucky me. My Aunt wanted AOL because she had a CD with three gazillion free hours of service. AOHell was such a shit about connecting that I gave it up as a bad job (not that I really tried all that hard) and contacted a local ISP in Shreveport who made her a similar deal, but without that hassle (no free hours, but the same monthly fee and usage.) I was so glad I didn’t have to have a victim of AOHell on my conscience.
The trip over to visit my relatives was hard enough without that.
If you want to get your AOL account cancelled, the best way is to get reported for breaking the TOS three times. Just go into a chat room, cuss once or twice, and get a friend to report you. Once that happens, your account is deleted. It’s a lot easier than going through hell with rude assholes for something that probably won’t happen anyway.
While I have no quarrel with good people slamming the pigfuckers at Assholes On 'Ludes, I feel the need to address some points made, being that I did tech support for another well-known software company years ago:
We always used our real first names, but rarely gave out our last names. Management didn’t want us to get harassed at home. We also could not transfer calls to anyone else (for a variety of reasons, sexism being chief among them), but were happy to have a manager call the customer back. And they always did, without exception.
“I spoke to John last time. Is he there?”
“Uh…”
Since there were at least 4 call centers, it was impossible to know everyone there. And when the original tech had a common name, it was impossible to know which person it was. Sometimes people would send out global emails to everyone with the same first name, like everyone named Bill. We caught holy hell directly from Mr. Gates for doing that.
When we instituted call tracking numbers, a lot of that problem was solved.
It often does, and trust me, the tech will get major shit (sometimes a pinkslip) for that sort of behavior.
Bullshit. Satisfying the customer was always the #1 priority. We bent over backwards for customers.
Once again, this was us, not AOL. But remember there are 2 sides to every phone call.
Bully for them; i wish more companies were like that. But that hasn’t always been my experience with call centres. Nor, it seems, was it Indygrrl’s. And nor has it been the experience of many others on these message boards, in numerous threads about customer service.
Again i say “bravo.” But again i also say that this sort of logical attempt to deal with the problem seems to be rather too uncommon. Witness the OP’s dilemma–the person on the other end would not give a last name (perhaps for good reasons), but also refused to give Indygrrlany information that would allow her to make the service rep accountable for his shitty behaviour. Can i have an employee number? No. Can i speak to someone else? No. Did he offer to get someone to call back? No. He just told her that she would have to call back herself, thus doing little more than making the whole thing someone else’s problem, while making sure there was no way that his assholish behaviour could be traced back to him. Great service!
Does someone call the customer in question, apologise for the shitty behaviour of the employee, and offer to solve the problem that should have been taken care of before? If not, then how do you expect the customer to have anything but a bad opinion of the company? What happens to the employee is irrelevant if the customers that have been fucked over are not contacted and reassured that their problems are being addressed.
Maybe so, but at many companies they expect the customers to bend over forwards for them. The fact that you know of one exception doesn’t invalidate complaints like Indygrrl’s.
Personally, i have Verizon DSL, and every time i have called, they have been models of courtesy and helpfulness. But i’m not going use that particular experience in an attempt to downplay the shitty service received by the OP, or the awful tactics that often seem to be standard operating policy for some companies.
You could try lodging a complaint with the Better Business Bureau. For some reason they seem to have a lot of leverage with huge, indifferent corporations.
I work as a tech (read: I take general inquiries from everyone, even though mostly it isn’t my responsibility) at one of the major banks down here in Australia.
If you’re a reasonable person to me when you call, I’ll make sure your problem gets solved as soon as possible, even if I have to spend an hour on “not ready” calling other departments when I can’t solve the problem myself. We use our real first names, although we don’t give out last names or staff numbers, if you ask for it we’ll make sure there is a way you can get back to us.
I’m not saying that your complaint isn’t valid, but if that was the letter you actually wrote, I wouldn’t expect anything done about it - at least once a week I get someone telling me the service is disgraceful, so-and-so is a bitch (this is about the point where I stop listening, because 99% of the time, this is simply untrue), they’re going to tell all their friends how much we suck and that they will be closing their accounts. If they’re feeling extra original, they’ll include a line about a solicitor somewhere in there. My response to that is usually something along the lines of “ok, thanks for your call”. If my brain had a recycle bin in it, thats where their complaint would be filed. If you want to get somewhere, your best bet is to just call again, hope you get somebody else and ask to speak to a supervisor so you can pass on a complaint - and if you want them to take you seriously, check the attitude in that letter at the front door.
Look at it this way though: at least you weren’t on hold for too long before you spoke to someone (I hope!)
Mine neither, but I think there is a major misconception going on here – that techs twist their handlebar moustaches and say “bwa ha ha” and dream up schemes where they can piss of even more customers. I think that most techs really want to provide good service (as this is usually less painful and more profitable than providing bad service), and must do so in the face of extreme adversity. Said adversity usually comes in the form of customers that, despite their self-described vast intellectual prowess, are usually dumber than sludge. And most often irate. And techs don’t get top dollar for their work. When I was a tech, I could barely afford to keep more than $2 worth of gas in my car at any one time.
It’s not rewarding work.
I suspect that most techs at AOL really do want to satisfy customers, and would be more than happy to cancel accounts, if not given incentives by the one entity in the universe lower on the rung than the plant death we call cutomers – management.
I worked in a call center for southwestern bell many many years ago…and i know about the tracking numbers that we had for each customer and the incident numbers for each customer…however i never gave out my real name…in fact in was a running joke for us to all have the last names of neumark…now the real thing about this is the warnin g that i would like to suggest for anyone reading this and not quite getting it…It is no myth that putting AOL on your machines screws them up totally untill you reformat your machine…i think in total it does about 40k in regestry changes, and then refuses to change it back when you try to remove it from your system. Also the files that it leaves on your system are a nightmare to remove. I wouldn’t even talk to someone who had put aol on thier machine when doing tech support…i would immediatly tell them they needed to call aol and have them walk through the steps of removing the garbage.
I cancelled my AOL account in April or May of last year. In October AOL charged my credit card again. I called AOL to learn that somehow (to this day I don’t know how) this was my fault. The rep told me that AOL keeps your account in something like a standby status for six months so that when you decide to return you can get your screen names back. They also keep your credit card on file for the same time period and refuse to delete it even upon point-blank instructions to do so. I told the rep “you know as well as I do how easy it is to hack AOL accounts and you’re telling me that you’re leaving my account sitting there ready to be accessed by anyone who types in my screen name and password?” Yep, pretty much. He finally shut down the screen names completely but refused to delete the credit card or do a chargeback. I finally had to go through my credit card company to get the two months back.
This is not always so. When my sister was 10, we had just signed up with AOL and she was relatively new to it. A friend sent her a chain e-mail and she forwarded it to several of her new online friends. I guess at least three of the online friends reported her, because the next time she went to sign on, it said the account had been suspended. All of the accounts were suspended, including the master screenname.
When I was trying to get the hang of AOL, I would watch what she did online sometimes, and there was not a whole lot that she did. She went into RPG chat rooms and Backstreet Boys chats, and never once violated any other TOS rules. At 10, I don’t even think she knew how to curse or be threatening. My father couldn’t believe that all of our accounts had been suspended because of one chain letter, so he phoned AOL. They told him that all of the accounts would be canceled unless she heard an apology. (??) So my father put my sister (who was so upset at losing her account that she was in tears) on the phone, and my sister explained everything. The end result was that AOL said we could keep their service. However, every last screenname would be suspended for six months, and we would continue to be billed for each month.
Needless to say, that was the last day we had AOL.
