   AOL: Tough call to cancel?
  Check this out: Cancelling AOLAccording to this article, this guy recorded his conversation with an AOL customer service representative, and the results are pretty rediculous.  What's worse: it seems to be happening all the time.  My feelings for AOL aside, it seems pretty pathetic that they -- and other companies for that matter -- can't hire quality representatives... How does that happen? Just lax hiring qualifications?   
  Why is this news to anyone?This has been happening as long as I can remember -- AOL employees on the quitting floor must make some percentage of quitters not actually quit, whether or not it include continuing to bill them or just giving them free trials. They do this, or they are fired. Believe me, I've tried to quit a 2-month free trial AOL account that I used for hotel access. This is intentional in every sense of the word.Skippy from the article got off relatively easily; there are people on AOLWatch who have been re-billed at least six or seven times and had to go to their credit card company to reject the charges -- at which point AOL started giving them free months on their account! A few eventually went to court.The various AOL-hating websites used to distribute fast-quit numbers; the standard customer service is supposed to retain customers and won't give you any help. They also distributed several scripts you can use.AOL's customer service is scum; they'd never outsource it because I'm pretty confident the language barrier would prevent the employees from being the biggest assholes possible.   ;  I think it is because AOL has some sort of quota that gives awards to people working in the call center. Like if you talk X people out of not cancelling their account - you get some type of bonus.The easiest way to cancel your AOL account it to tell them that you are moving to some country in Africa for a 10-year research project and you will not have access to a computer. At least, that worked for me when I cancelled my girlfriend's account.EDIT: Damn, rav beat me to it.   ;  Just tell them you are commiting suicide tomorrow.   ;Quote:AOL "cancellation reps" get a wage of $6 an hour, but for every account they "save" from cancellation they get a $3 - $5 kickback.From hereIsn't that illegal? If not, it should be.   ;  if that is company policy, and is happening so often, how is AOL not being charged with something? It can't be legal to keep taking someone's money for services they are telling you to stop sending.   ;  well the thing is...from a dollars and cents point of view it makes sense. What are you going to do? Piss off the customer? He's cancelling, the worse that will happen is that he goes through with it.I remember back in the day if you used to call up aol and tell them you were quitting they would give you a few free months, now that was an even better idea.  Cause after the free months (who's going to turn that down?), you would forget to cancel and go through it all over again.   ;  my dad a few years back when contacting aol for a simple problem actually got so mad you could hear him yelling in his office from the outside of the building...aol has always been crap with thier customer service. thier e-mail customer support is no better as they only give you thier copy and paste answers...but alwell, i am just glad that i no longer  have aol (i had them for 3 years...).   ;  Well another weird thing is: Somebody I know gave their AOL pw away through some fake email that said it was from AOL. (This was five or six years ago). When he called the AOL rep to get it fixed they told him if he did it again they would cancel his account? That's weird... i mean, I thought they wanted to keep customers...   ;  As a former customer service rep (though not with AOL, thankfully), I can't help but feel a little for the AOL reps.Bottom line is, they only do what they get taught at the call center. Some of the reps calls will be recorded, at random, and gone over for performance reviews, and I'm sure they get chewed out if a call gets recorded in which they do not try to stop someone from cancelling their account.Don't be mad at the CS reps, they're just doing they're job. Be mad at AOL and their call center for terrible policies.   