If you haven’t seen or heard Vincent Ferrari’s run-in with AOL, please do. A former customer of AOL, Mr. Ferrari tried to close his dial-up internet account. In the process he received AOL’s notorious customer care treatment. This included patronizing and scornful remarks from AOL’s representative as part of an obvious attempt to frustrate the goal of Mr. Ferrari’s call. The company has in the past been forced to sign agreements with federal and state regulators to reform abusive customer retention practices, but this is the first time it was caught-out in public. You can link to the coverage from Mr. Ferrari’s blog, Insignificant Thoughts, at www.duggmirror.com/technology/MP3_Recording:_Trying_to_cancel_AOL.

I felt a touch of deja vu while listening to and reading about this. Several years ago EarthLink ignored my repeated requests to cancel an internet account, and then claimed that because the account had not been cancelled, they did not have to refund the charges to my credit card. When I moved last fall, Verizon failed to disconnect my landline service, charged the new residents’ phone to my bill, and even then refused to clear the charges from my account. My unsuccessful attempt to clear-up this snafu took over an hour of long-distance phone time, during which I was transferred from one office to another, and repeatedly ‘reassured’ that their record-keeping systems were infallible. Funny, but the broadband and wireless division had successfully altered my service after receiving the same, centralized notification. There is HSBC, which until a few weeks ago refused to acknowledge repeated requests to close my bank account. They did, however, keep deducting service charges in the meantime. Only a written threat to contact a private attorney as well as the NYS Attorney Generals Office turned that behaviour around. And lets not forget Dell, whose spontaneously combusting laptops and miserly customer service are grabbing headlines. Flying under the radar is Dell’s decision to make its computers incompatible with third-party power-adapter like those produced by iGO and Targus. Dell’s inferior substitute means that if you have left your adapter elsewhere during a commute or trip and need a replacement, you are screwed. Unless you wait days for a special order from Dell at exorbitant cost.

Truth be told, in most of the instances I cite above, a customer service agent did their best to help me. But they were frustrated in their efforts by the help system – they were not empowered to make ‘that kind of decision’, did not have access to the right ‘screen’, or they could only proceed with the ‘clearance’ of a supervisor who was currently ‘unavailable’. One might speculate that this is unofficial corporate policy, knowing that the meager penalties meted out by weak regulatory bodies is more than offset by the incremental, volume-based profits of accounting overcharges.

So long as you can avoid too much bad publicity. For more on the bad press, and lots of it, visit The Consumerist blog.

Photo: www.gapingvoid.com