Last week AOL found themselves with a PR tiger by the tail.
And it's still growling.
You see, AOL had a customer named Vincent Ferrari. One day Mr. Ferrari decided he no longer wanted to be a customer of AOL. And since, becoming an AOL customer was simple, quick and easy, you'd think canceling his membership would be just as easy.
Wrong!
Here's where it gets fun.
Mr. Vincent had heard that sometimes AOL could be a bit difficult in this situation, so he decided to record the phone call, in case they gave him trouble.
Which they did.
During the phone call, the AOL representative ignored Mr. Vincent's request eight times. Finally, after the ninth time he asked, the AOL customer service employee did what Mr. Vincent asked.
The encounter so frustrated Mr. Vincent that he posted the audio file on his website.
As a result, he has become a minor media celebrity in the last two weeks.
(Already, a Google web search on "Vincent Ferrari" returns over 125,000 listings.)
And, AOL has had a firestorm of bad publicity, both on the Internet and in the mainstream media.
This provides a couple important lessons for us.
One is that you can't hide from bad behavior or mistakes anymore. The communication power of the Internet is too great. Now more than ever, we need to treat our customers right and act with integrity.
All the time.
We can create all the marketing and communications message we want. We can spend millions of dollars telling people how wonderful we are.
But, in the end, our actions tell the real story. And the power of the Internet will make sure the story gets told.
The second lesson is that we need to use the communications power of the Internet to know when our customers are not happy. This might prevent little problems from turning into major nightmares.
Remember, Vincent Ferrari would never have recorded his "cancel call" if he had not already heard how difficult AOL made it for people to cancel. AOL had every opportunity to hear their customer's complaints about how they handled cancellations.
For years they did nothing.
So, now they've paid the price in bad publicity.
What's ironic is that AOL is a media/Internet company.
Go figure!
Well, as much as you want to make this a pure communication issue, it is much more.
This is a company culture who has buried its head in an anti customer environment. This really doesn't surprise me since it is an IT industry idiom.
Any company that lacks the foresight to address the customers and their needs first is headed down the tunnel to consumer activism. Much as Dell found out when they pissed off a couple of their customers. They went on line and Dell lost 14% of the market in 3 months time. Ouch.
What is now happening to AOL is a communication revolution for consumers, but it is an even bigger statement for businesses to start taking their customers more seriously.
Posted by: Tim Whelan | June 26, 2006 8:52 PM | Permalink to Comment