Corporate America Will Eat Itself

Last night, I was surfing channels and came across a report on Scarborough Country on MSNBC about this guy named Vincent Ferrari who was calling AOL to cancel his service. He had heard horror stories from a number of people who had done the same thing, only to be put through the ringer by the rep on the other end. Learning this, he decided to record his conversation to see if the horror stories had any merit. The way he figured it, he explained, was that it would give him something to write about regardless of which way the conversation went. Well, as predicted, the rep did everything he could to try and keep him from canceling his account, including ridiculously padding the conversation. Read more about it here.

The final result of the call was that the service was cancelled and Vincent Ferrari posted the conversation on his website. This, in turn, prompted others to share their tales of woe and misfortune in forcibly weaning themselves from Internet For Beginners. Eventually, this guy got his story told all over the NBC networks - including the Today show - and has a movie deal in the works about a guy innocently trying to cancel his Internet service who then becomes digitally abducted into a virtual environment and must try to escape by disabling the Master Control Program.

Okay, just kidding about the movie deal. Apparently, not getting Angelina Jolie as his love interest was a deal-breaker. Or some shit like that.

Anyway, what pisses me off about the whole thing was AOL's response to Ferrari:

"At AOL, we have zero-tolerance for customer care incidents like this - which is deeply regrettable and also absolutely inexcusable. The employee in question violated our customer service guidelines and practices, and everything that AOL believes to be important in customer care - chief among them being respect for the member, and swiftly honoring their requests. This matter was dealt with immediately and appropriately, and the employee cited here is no longer with the Company.

"I've spoken directly to Mr. Ferrari and personally apologized to him for what took place. Many here have taken a strong interest in this episode - even going so far as to email all customer service representatives about it as an example of how we should never treat a member. We're going to learn from this - and continue to make the necessary, positive changes to our practices. This was an aberration and a mistake, and we have to manage these incidents down to zero as best we can. That means improving our already strong safeguards in place today, and maintaining rigorous internal and external compliance methods. We can do better - and we will."

Now, will everyone who honestly believes that this isn't total bullshit, please raise your hands? Yeah, I didn't think so. Wait a minute, there are a couple of you in the back with your hands up. Oh, you poor, naive fools. You've never actually worked for a major corporation in any significant role, have you? Let me attempt to summarize what this message means as plainly as possible:

Holy shit! Did we get caught with our pants down, or what? Man, are we ever sorry we got exposed on national TV for what we've been doing for years. We are so, super-duper sorry. Just to prove how sorry we are that we got caught, we even fired the poor bastard that was just doing what he was told to do by his management team. After all, somebody's gotta pay for this, and it sure as hell isn't going to be the people who are being told by executive management to do whatever it takes to stop the massive hemorrhaging of customers who are tired of being overcharged for Internet access, e-mail and bloated software that screws up anything it touches.

We told Mr. Ferrari how very sorry we were that he recorded us screwing him over as badly as we screw over anyone else who tries to disconnect from our service. We've even e-mailed a transcript of this conversation to everyone in our customer service to cover our asses should anyone get any ideas about a class-action lawsuit and decide to subpoena our records. This way, we can credibly claim in a court of law that we as a company tried to do the right thing, but it was a few hundred rogue employees that screwed up because they chose to do what they could to keep their shitty jobs. We'll relax our quotas for a couple of months until all this blows over, then once the numbers start rising again, we'll go right back to beating up middle management about the piss-poor retention rates and exhort them to do something about it, rather than do anything to address the underlying conditions about why people are fleeing our dying service model in droves.

The bottom line is that Vincent Ferrari was simply a messenger, and the AOL rep is the corporate scapegoat. Furthermore, this isn't the first time that AOL has been nailed for stuff like this. The State of Ohio filed a class-action suit against them back in 2003 for these same types of shenanigans, as have a number of other states. Yet, the beat goes on. My prediction is that, unless these assclowns radically retool their business strategy to adapt to the current environment, AOL will soon become another footnote in American Business History; alongside such fallen giants as PanAm, Woolworth's and Commodore International.