Bryan C. Fleming

Let’s face it. America Online is notorious for continuously billing people monthly service fees when they want to cancel their service. In fact, you nearly have to cancel your credit card to stop the billing process.

A few weeks ago AOL announced a massive round of layoffs. They also announced AOL would be free.

You can imagine my surprise when my wife fired up her trusty AOL Software and saw a pop-up ad asking her to convert her paying membership to a new one. Which program? The free one!

Hats off to AOL. I think they did it right here and truthfully I’m impressed. They could have easily hit my wife’s credit card for $10 a month for years. Instead they did the right thing and won her as a patron for long long time.

The Lesson: If you want to win customers. Do the right thing. Nickel and dimming them to death won’t grow your business. It will only build ill will. I suspect AOL will be much better off from the path they’ve chosen.

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