heehee! Sorry. All thumbs today.
b.
You have now entered the shadowy world of the “Member Retention Consultant.”
No kidding. Back when you lived in Tucson, Opal, the calls for cancellation probably still went through the non-technical customer service support lines; I know that back when I was an AOL tech they did. But now, they have a whole department here that is specifically designed to keep people from cancelling. Whose bonuses are based on how many times they can keep from pressing the ‘cancel account’ button.
Whee.
I won’t burden the hamsters with a search, but I recall a thread in this forum some months ago about AOL, and the difficulties of trying to cancel. Someone reported immediate success when he told the nice “member retention” person that he was canceling because he no longer owned a computer. Sounded like a winning strategy, to me!
A friend of mine related the hysterical story of what happened to one of his business partners. It seems she thought that it’d be a good idea to send out spam advertising their business through her AOL account. Shortly after she sent out her spam (some 15,000 pieces, if that’s the right word), she got a call from AOL informing her that her service was cancelled and that she’d never be allowed back. Something to think about trying if you’re tired of talking to the idiots on the phone. 
No, please don’t contribute to the spam problem. If you do, then AOL has already won.
Customer retention is big business. I myself do it at customer service, though I would never mislead anyone. It simply makes good business sense to make sure people know their options before cancelling - a lot of people cancel because of reasons that we can actually fix.
My advice to you: don’t wait until your credit card is charged. This is usually a hassle that involves several calls, checking back, etc. Call to confirm cancellation over the phone. Take names and dates. Ask for written confirmation of cancellation of the account. If possible, ask for them to remove your credit card number from their database (as likely they keep it on file).
It sounds like you talked to a bad individual and I honestly wouldn’t trust them not to “accidentally” not cancel the account in order to improve their personal retention statistics.
What I found out when I called to cancel my AOL service is that they won’t terminate the service until the end of the current billing cycle. You should expcect one last bill and that’ll be it. Only complain to them if you get two bills.
BTW: my billing cycle was up on 2 January. I tried accessing my account on 3 Jan. to see if it had indeed been cancelled and it had.
Ah, AOL member retention. These guys are so much fun! They called me for weeks and weeks after I cancelled my account (and cussed out the poor operator who was just doing her job. I feel bad about it, but goddamn, I was sick of AOL) After the first few, I just started giving increasingly bizarre answers. “I’m sorry, but I’m recently deceased, and heaven runs its own ISP,” was a good one, as was, “According to my priest, you guys are Satan. Sorry, I really liked your service, but I’m not going to hell just for Instant Messaging.”
I signed up Jan 2002 for AOL for the free year that came with my Gateway. I gave 'em a credit card that expired in 3/02. Guess what just popped up on my credit card? Yup, an AOL charge. I moved to AT&T cable internet about 3 months ago and have no real use for AOL anymore. I’m just curious how they got the renewed card number. Damn them!
Here’s another ploy they try: You sign up for the free month. At the end of the free month, you say “I want to cancel”. They say, “Oh you just need some more time to see how great AOL is! How does another free month sound?” And they hope you’ll forget to call back to cancel at the end of the NEXT month…
I don’t think this is a theory. The last ISP I worked for had us make sure to remove AOL from any computer we helped install our program on. People who refused this would end up calling back by the end of the week, and a lot of problems that I worked mysteriously cleared up when AOL was discovered and removed.
And don’t fall for the “Oh, don’t worry, your account will terminate automatically at the end of the free trial period” BS. Make sure you get an actual cancellation reference number.
I think most of my problems with AOL were my own creation, as I didn’t really understand how AOL ‘worked’. I had set up an account for a friend on my credit card. (a good friend, still a friend, a decent type of person so that wasn’t the problem).
It took forever to cancel because I didn’t have the account number, or my friends password the first time I called. After getting this information, losing it, obtaining it again, and finally FINDING the number to call AOL, I cancelled the account. Specifically stating the account number, password, and the credit card number for it to be ‘closed’.
And yet, I realized the next month that I was still being billed. I thought maybe it was a month lapse time, one never knows, and waited until the next month.
No such luck.
I had to call my friend (she’d moved to florida) to again get the account number and password which I’d of course tossed after assuming all was well. Of course, my friend has to search through her papers and after a week I had the account number and password in hand AGAIN.
I asked them why they had not cancelled the account.
It’s very simple. My friend has created three different names on that one account number for the chat rooms…apparently they thought I was just canceling the first id name, which is really silly as it’s VERY EASY to delete an id. Also odd is the fact that I had made very clear that I was canceling the AOL account number to my credit card…
It all felt a little sneaky to me.
Same thing here. We got our Gateway for Christmas with “6 free months” of AOL service. When we naturally opted to go with our current MSN account, we had one hell of a time connecting, I’ll tell you. I currently hook up using the “MSN Test Connection” and manually open a browser window using the “Internet Explorer” icon. We’ve yet to delete AOL, and this may be the source of all this trouble. Thanks to Cessandra for confirming what I thought was a theory, as well as to whoever contributed ways to defeat the inevitable “…But-But, we want you baccc-cck!” calls from A.O.Hell that we most probably will get.
Been with AOHell going on 7 years now.
No problems. Even was not bad during the access troubles.
Had ‘full’ accounts and ‘bring your own accounts’.
Best and safest email around IMO.
I try to never use AOL to browse with. At home we have DSL.
I still like some of the AOHell only sites.
I like the number of local dial up numbers nation wide when traveling.
Price is competitive with most of the others.
They seem about average in the ‘screw the customer’ department as compared to most of the larger ISP’s.
MSN is the hands down winner on being BAD…
Never had trouble with connection to any ISP with AOL installed on a computer. ::: shrug :: just luck I guess.