Bad Behavior at AOL

One of the areas that I study and teach about is customer
service.  I did a lot of my early
research on jobs that require people to express certain emotions and suppress others,
including telephone bill collectors, 7/Eleven clerks, and police interrogators.
I’ve become more interested in service experiences again in the last year
or so, and in fact, a group of us including Michael Dearing (who just left eBay
after over six years as a senior executive), Perry Klebahn (inventor of the modern snowshoe and a
former Patagonia executive), Liz Gerber (a fantastic Stanford doctoral
student and skilled product designer) and I are developing a new Stanford d.school class on designing
service experiences next Fall. And Huggy Rao of the Stanford Business School and I are teaching a new executive program next November on Customer-Focused Innovation.

My renewed interest in services is driven heavily by the bewildering
and often idiotic things that organizations to do us as customers.  I won’t do the complete rant here, but I’ve
had some experiences with Air France that were simply unbelievable blends of arrogance and incompetence, for
example.  One experience was so bad that
I really couldn’t figure out how to get them to pay attention to me without
having a strategic temper tantrum (an incident I describe in my chapter on the
virtues of assholes in The No Asshole Rule).  But the experience I had with Air France was
nothing compared to the treatment that an AOL customer received when he tried
to cancel his account. Go to Insignificant
Thoughts and listen to the audio of the poor guy who was trying to cancel
his account.  The entire company owes
this guy an apology. When I hear something like this, my reaction is “now that
is a company that deserves to die.”