Ok. Not an original title. But I’m frustrated.

People who know me will tell you that I’m no fan of AOL. In fact, I believe that you ought to go out and register your own domain name and get yourself an address that you “own” … an address you can use for the rest of your life no matter what ISP you happen to use.

But back to AOL.

A while back I had another experience with AOL that just convinced me again that AOL Sucks.

I have a client who used to use AOL. I eventually convinced her to change and we moved to an alternative webmail provider that lets her and her staff work more professionally. (In case you are interested, it is http://www.Mailtrust.com. My client has been very pleased.)

They allowed their old AOL account to continue to run, checked it, forwarded new email to their new account, and told everyone who wrote about the new address. After a while the volume on the old account declined and they decided to cancel the AOL.

Unfortunately, at the time they cancelled, they had just returned from a vacation and the AOL account had a vacation message on it.

The result is that when you emailed this CANCELLED account, you didn’t get a bounce. Instead, you got the old vacation message.

Ok. I can see how a poor design and a lack of a comprehensive test plan could allow this, but I’d just call and get them to fix it.

The first problem was getting AOL to even understand the problem. They kept assuring me that my account was cancelled. The fact that it might still be working wrong after being cancelled took a bit of persuasion. Eventually they decided I needed tech support.

After repeating everything again tech support began to attempt to diagnose the problem. No it didn’t relate to AOL on my PC. No, it wasn’t an operating system error. No it didn’t have anything to do with my firewall. And after being on hold for a while the polite, but inexperienced tech support guy returned to tell me that it might be a server problem and could I please hold more.

After more holding, he returned again. He was right. It was a server problem. And get this, he’d managed to get the server people to promise to get it fixed within 3 months. THREE MONTHS!

I’m a patient person. But when I lose it, it is gone.

So … I called back to the billing department,

Then I had them reactivate the account to a free service and reset the password since no one at the client could remember the old one. (No charge for all this.)

Then I logged in and turned off the vacation message.

And finally, I called back and cancelled again.

The result is that everything is ok. But I spent 45 minutes I didn’t need to. And AOL spent all that time not being particularly helpful.

The most infuriating part of the whole thing was the tech guy trying to tell me that since he wasn’t in the server department, it really wasn’t his problem, and also since it was a server problem it really wasn’t a problem, and implying strongly that 3 months is an acceptable response time.

Customer service courses have preached for years that despite the silos employees live in, your customers don’t see silos. They see a company.

Maybe AOL should take some of those courses.