Phil Huang

Month: June 2006

  • Cancellations the Way It’s Supposed to Be Done

    About a month ago, I signed for a trial membership over at Doba, a wholesale dropshipper directory. Basically it’s a list of different manufacturers and distributors that will dropship orders for you. For those unfamiliar with dropshipping, you take the order, forward it to the dropshipper, and they’ll ship the item to your customer. You charge the customer a retail price and the dropshipper charges you the wholesale price plus shipping fees. They will usually remain transparent in this process so the customer thinks you’ve sent them the product. So anyway, I called to cancel my trial membership yesterday and I only had to speak with the customer service rep for literally 2 minutes.

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  • The Nightmare of Cancelling AOL

    06/22/06 UPDATE: The guy trying to cancel the AOL account, Vincent Ferrari, was featured on a NBC segment with Matt Lauer and they played part of the his phone conversation. AOL has even issued a public apology to him. It doesn’t matter. If it has to take this much attention on the web and TV to make you issue one apology to one former customer, then there is something fundamentally very wrong with how your company does business. The rep apparently got fired according to AOL but I’m sure that was what he was trained to do. There’s no fixing this PR mess. See the NBC segment after the jump.

    Originally posted 06/15/06:
    Here’s another example of how AOL systematically works against its customers. Listen to this phone conversation of a guy just trying to cancel his account. It’s pretty unbelievable how the rep keeps refusing to just honor the caller’s wishes. If it were me I’d be pretty damn pissed off.

    (Audio recording no longer available)

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  • Verizon DSL Sucks

    At home, for my Internet connection, I use Verizon DSL and I’m pretty unsatisfied with the service. I initially signed up for Verizon DSL last June because my mom wanted to go online. She’s a pretty light Internet user and only visits a handful of websites. So it wasn’t a big deal. But during school breaks when I came home and especially now, I’ve found that Verizon DSL is slow and unreliable.

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  • Why AOL Still Sucks

    Remember my old rants about how America Online basically lied to me? Well, they’re still at it. And I’m not sure why they keep doing this. Their dial-up members are leaving in droves. It doesn’t really help your brand when you keep deceiving people like this.

    A story in the Chicago Tribune describes how a man was persuaded to keep his AOL account for just $4.95 a month which included unlimited access but ended up getting charged $1,595.69.

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  • Graduation and Other Miscellaneous Thoughts

    Moving My Belongings From Ithaca

    There was no flippin way I was going to get all of my stuff into my relatively tiny Maxima so I had to pack up a lot of crap into boxes last week, to get them shipped off. In total, I packed up 4 boxes and my printer. Boxes mostly included old textbooks, which I have a lot of, winter clothes, and other clutter/junk. You know what I’m talking about – when everything’s tucked away in drawers and shelves you don’t notice, but once you have to start packing, you realize how much clutter you actually have. Slight hitch with the pickup, but the boxes were picked up on Saturday and I hope they’ve been shipped out by now. I have to call them up tomorrow to confirm.

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