"The utter stupidity of this is staggering"
— Michael Arrington, TechCrunch article
When it rains, it pours at AOL. It is becoming a fantastic case study in how tech companies can go wrong. I only pray that they can save the brand. Couple of quick points:
1) read the tea leaves and respond to industry changes aggressively
2) the customer is king. Make the customer happy (profitably) and the rest takes care of itself.
3) take your customer feedback as gospel (no "the customer doesn’t get it…")
4) your strategy is flawed if you have to resort to strong arming tactics to maintain customers.
5) big companies have trouble maintaining innovation and agility.
6) all it takes is one or two really bad customer experiences to undermine a franchise. (avoid public embarrassments on the Today Show!)
Instead of heavy prose, here is the meaty gossip.
— AOL Consumer Data Leak AOL just acknowledged that it released the search history on 20 million web queries from 650,000 AOL users. In addition to violating the customer’s trust/covenant with the company, it is also going to unleash a fire storm both in the courts (ambulance chasers are popping the champaign corks today) and in Congress (round 2 on consumer privacy). It also slams the firms already sunken public image.
— NBC Ferrari Call AOL has rolled out a customer retention program that relies on customer service agents to convince, obstruct or cajole users from canceling their service. This Ferrari video recording is impressive even by most call center standards. Not working. In June alone, they lost 1 million subscribers. This is one reason they went to a free model, supported by ads.
— Even dead people can’t escape AOL Retention part 2…a St. Louis women has fought for 9 months to cancel her deceased father’s account.
This is the nightmare realized by a large tech corporation as well as small ones. Once the blogosphere gets hold of something, it spreads like wildfire. The blogosphere is amazing for its customer acquisition efficiency but it also has this dark side. If you query "Ferrari AOL customer service", you get 330,000 hits. That is a lot of coverage on the story (granted not all are on this story).
Kyptonite had one of the most blatant example of a brand being mashed by a) dumb PR and response and b) the efficient blogosphere. Several years ago, someone realized they could pop a Kryptonite lock with a Bic pen. They wrote the company and it responded defensively and negated the claim. Spurned, the customer made a video and released it showing how the pin tumbler mechanism was susceptible to failure. This spread like wildfire. Not only did it create significant damage at the time, these posts are permanently on the web. Today, if you query Google on "Kryptonite locks", half of top 10 or 20 listings are about this incident. It even has a Wikipedia entry.
Here is a link to the recent AOL article in its entirety:
AOL, a unit of Time Warner Inc., made the information available for download through its research site.
The people were randomly chosen among users of AOL’s search engine from
March through May. Each record was stripped of the person’s screen
name, which was replaced with a number.