A former AOL CSR, Michael, writes about how the company axes employees who don’t give cancelling customers the proper retaining:

Having worked at AOL’s Jacksonville Call Center for 2 years, I can safely tell you I was fired for NOT doing exactly what that AOL Ass(ociate) was doing…

Someone once said “Please cancel my account.” I took that at face value and cancelled the account… three weeks later I was fired!

Good. You should have been fired.

When a customer calls to cancel, it is the company’s duty to find out why. Perhaps there does exist a solution the customer was not aware of. Perhaps its just frustration that can be mitigated with some service discounts. However, if these don’t work, the customer shouldn’t have to argue with the Sphinx to get the service stopped.

It’s not just niceness, its economics. Chargebacks are more expensive than fairly and reasonably handling cancellation requests.

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