Inside the Mind of a Freelance Copywriter

Cancel your account? No way!!!

Retaining customers and obtaining repeat sales is, of course, sound business practice, although there are good and bad ways of going about it. One example of the lengths companies will go to to achieve this is the way customer service representatives are trained to try and dissuade you when you call to cancel a service.

Now, asking customers if it is that they are not satisfied and why, or offering them an incentive to stay on is one thing. But the experience of Vincent Ferrari, an ex-customer of American Internet service provider AOL is unfortunately typical in an environment where many companies foolishly put customer retention before customer satisfaction.

30 year old Vincent wakes up one day and figures that since he doesn’t really use his internet account any more he might as well cancel it and save some money. He calls AOL customer service, spends four minutes listening to an automated hello message and eleven minutes on hold. And then things quickly get interesting!

Meet Jon, the customer service rep from hell, who, after asking for name and last four credit card digits to confirm Vincent’s identity, goes on to ask irrelevant questions including whether Vincent uses his account for business or for school. When Vincent insists on cancelling, Jon tells him, “Turning off your account… would be the worst thing that…” Oh please! Jon goes on to add insult to injury by asking Vincent to put his dad on the line as though he were speaking to a child.

Vincent recorded the phone call, intending to either prove or disprove the account cancellation horror stories that he had heard, but it took him a couple of weeks to decide to write the blog post that sparked off a huge media circus of bad publicity for AOL. Listen to the recording here.

Although Jon was promptly fired, it took AOL a whole week to issue an official apology to Vincent Ferrari. Hardly the ultimate in crisis management if you ask me!

While it is clear from the recording that Jon overstepped the limits of courtesy and respect for the customer, this incident speaks volumes about the kind of pressure to retain customers at all costs that reps are subjected to by their employers.

It’s a pity that companies often forget that whenever the customer is not happy it is their business that will ultimately suffer.

June 23rd, 2006 TrackBack URI