You can really summarize companies in two general categories:
Profit Oriented
(Obviously this is a sliding scale but for the majority, companies will prefer one or the other.)
I have observed companies like Logitech and In-And-Out to be very Customer Oriented. When they (or even I) messed something up, they would go out of their way to fix it for me. And because of this customer orientation, I speak highly of them, and spend more money with them.
AOL is on the other end of the spectrum: Profit Oriented. They go out of their way to stop you from canceling their services etc. Their first programs were basically impossible to uninstall from your computer unless you were a computer genius… and even then it could take weeks to really get it off of your computer.
My first email address was with AOL, and when we realized that we could get better internet connection for cheaper elsewhere, we tried to uninstall it from our computer… for two years. Granted we didn’t know a lot about our computer, but we did know that once something is uninstalled, it shouldn’t keep making shortcuts on your desktop…
“But that was years ago, they are better now…”
If you believe that, I recommend checking out some of these people who tried to cancel their AOL account within the last few years:
Ask Dave Taylor how he canceled his AOL account.
Vincent Ferrari tries to cancel his AOL account.
AOL’s business decisions have lead to shirts that say “Friends don’t let friends use AOL” and hopefully will end up destroying them.
-Customer Service is King
-Ashton Sanders