AOL Desk Experience (Score 2, Interesting)

I did a stint on the Compuserve/AOL help desk in college (in the 90s heydey of dial-up). I technically worked in the cancellations department, and my job was to "Save" accounts by convincing people not to cancel. I saved countless accounts by helping people quickly and easily fix common dial-up issues or re-install TCP/IP in Windows 95/98/Me. I was of course eventually fired for going "off-script" since there was no script for actually fixing a computer... even though I was successfully convincing people not to cancel the account that they couldn't even log onto. When I started the job there was no script. Once they handed out scripts it got pretty absurd and rather pointless to even take the call. The scripts were worded so that you were basically saying "I'm not going to cancel your account" in a way that sounded like you said "I just canceled your account." As long as the customer said "okay" you were supposed to keep the account active, hang up, and call it a save. I never did that, and had much more success anyway. During a good week I would save 300 accounts, snagging a $1 per acct bonus plus hourly wages (15 - 20 hours at MAYBE min. wage if I remember correctly). This was WAY more saves than anyone else in the office who didn't know the first thing about actually fixing a customer's problem. My call times were a bit longer than other employees, but my save rate was FAR higher. I earned enough to buy a car before getting fired, which was all I was there for anyhow. AOL basically didn't care about fixing problems, they just wanted you to convince the customer to put the account on "hold" so that next time they opened IE and it automagically dialed in, the customer would be charged for an account they thought they had closed.