Sunday’s New York Times featured an article about AOL’s fiasco in trying to keep Vincent Ferrari, an ordinary Bronx resident, as a customer.

The short story is, like many AOL customers, this guy wanted to cancel his account. The process took him 21 minutes and if not abusive, was certainly insulting. The best line in it is "When I say, ‘Cancel the account,’ I don’t mean, ‘Figure out how to help me keep it.’ I mean, ‘Cancel the account.’ "

You can hear hear his call with AOL and what he thought about it on YouTube.
Watch it. It’s incredible.

It got me thinking about two premises:

1. The most important measure of the power of a brand is would you recommend it to a friend. Conversely if you hate a brand how many people will you tell.
2. Satisfaction=Experience/Expectation (Note this means divided by. Duh Adam!). If you have set a high expectation with people about what you will deliver and you deliver a poor experience, they will hate you.

AOL has lost the plot. AOL grew like a rocket in 90’s because they made it easy for people who were new to online to enjoy the experience. Once people no longer needed training wheels, their point of difference evaporated. I don’t envy them but they have brought their current situation on themselves. They are so desperate not to lose customers, that they have lost sight of what it takes to keep customers happy. I don’t know what this should be with AOL now but it sure isn’t this.

There is a little bit of irony in this too. They were one of the key enablers of getting people online. Of the hundreds of millions of people online, many of them got started on AOL. As the Internet makes news like this travel so much faster, when they do something stupid like this, the thing they helped create kills them faster.

Adam Turinas