I had to pull the plug.

To Whom It May Concern:

In April, I subscribed to what was then called AOL CallWays. From the very beginning, the telephone number that AOL assigned to me was the target of an unusual amount of unwanted calls, mainly from charitable organisations, telephone survey groups, and the like. I added the line to the Do Not Call list, which seemed to eliminate the more obvious telemarketing calls but had little or no impact on those “exempt” calls.

On September 30, I contacted what is now known as AOL TotalTalk, to request that the telephone number be changed, hoping that it would be possible to capture a number not inundated with unwanted calls. Remarkably, the online support representative was not capable of providing more than a handful of apparently “stock” sentence answers, and at the end of the conversation, he, she, or “it” repeated itself a half-dozen times.

After failing to find any resolution from your online help “live chat,” I called the AOL TotalTalk Member Services line. I spoke with a representative who indicated that it was not possible for TotalTalk to provide a new phone number to existing subscribers; he indicated the only option was to terminate the service, likely pay a $50 “early termination fee,” and “attempt” to reestablish the service at least 24 hours later. I couldn’t believe this was the case, and, as such, I asked to speak with a supervisor. I was told a supervisor was not available, and that I had no alternative.

The next morning, I called the number listed on the AOL VoIP Beta page, otherwise apparently referred to as “Field Support.” The representative confirmed the information provided the evening before. Still in awe, I asked to speak with a supervisor, and was transferred to a “team lead.” This person, again, reiterated that AOL TotalTalk could not fulfill such a basic request, but promised to waive the $50 fee if I was “able to reactivate.” (His cautionary statement was apparently caused by concerns with AOL’s recent upgrade of its TotalTalk systems.) I informed him that I would not pay the $50 fee under any circumstances, and he clarified that he “believe[d] it [would] be waived”.

Perhaps he did, in fact, have insight into the fact that, now, nearly four days later, I have phoned more than a half-dozen times in attempts to reactivate my service. Your backoffice system has prevented me from agreeing to your terms of service for TotalTalk, sent order confirmation numbers that apparently cannot be tied to any reactivation request, and has provided information for an order that your TotalTalk Member Services now (admittedly inexplicably) cannot find or verify. To make matters even worse, they cannot place a new order as the ordering system insists there is an existing order, which that same system cannot not produce and which your representatives cannot otherwise find.

Throughout this ordeal, promises have grown from “no more than 48 hours of downtime” to “at least ten days” until my service may–or may not–be restored. Neither your basic TotalTalk Member Services team, nor your Field Support team have offered any proactive solutions, aside from “putting in a ticket” and waiting 48 hours–for either an answer, or a rejection, of that ticket.

Regrettably, throughout this process, I have learned a number of frightening details about AOL’s TotalTalk operations. Supervisors are reportedly not available for your Member Services staff in Tampa afterhours. Member of this staff claim that they have no leads, no ability to contact a supervisor, and no immediate process for handling an issue outside of their limited scope, of any scale (confirmed minor outages, widespread outages, complete outages, local emergencies, or widescale disasters). Alarmingly, such an important services as TotalTalk, which claims to provide “911 emergency service,” in effect, has no process, procedure, or even a speculative idea of how to handle a true emergency that could affect hundreds or even thousands of customers.

My own concerns are obviously very important to me. Why have I been forced to go without service for days–and counting–for a simple feature request which nearly any other telephone company in the country (traditional or VoIP) can process in under 24 hours? Why has this timeframe expanded dramatically beyond the promised 48 hours? Does AOL have any concern for the potential impact the lack of 911 service, well outside the provided window, might have on me? Why does AOL have no ability to handle legitimate billing concerns proactively for its TotalTalk service? Why not empower your staff of both tier one and tier two support to handle realistic problems they claim to frequently come across?

And yet, while my concerns are substantial even standing on their own, the major, public implications are even more startling. Why does AOL apparently have no disaster plan or emergency outage procedures in place for its frontline call centre? Why is its Field Support staff limited to “putting in a ticket” and waiting 48 hours for a response? Does AOL actually have service level agreements with its VoIP vendors? If so, why doesn’t it hold those vendors to those agreements?

Why does AOL seemingly have no mechanism for providing relevant feedback to the project and product management of TotalTalk? Why do representatives indicate supervisors aren’t available? Why do supervisors, when they can be reached, indicate that they report to “no one”? Why do team leads represent themselves as the last line of defense–a defense that can’t withstand even (apparently) minimal account issues?

Certainly, I have a whole history of concerns with AOL. I do not use AOL as my primary Internet provider; I have kept the account as a convenience for staying in contact with those who have never updated their address books with my new address, even after all these years. In the well-over ten years during which I have been an AOL customer (under one screenname or another), I have never found AOL to be particularly responsive to customer concerns… Be it the decades old problem of the limited portability of screennames, to any of a slue of other troubles that should have been solved years ago.

Still, like many of the thousands of other TotalTalk customers, I took TotalTalk for what it claimed to be: a replacement for home, landline telephone service. (Given my experience with AOL, I may have taken that claim with a slightly larger grain of salt than most.) Providing email is one thing–providing access to emergency 911 service is quite another. Decades of problems have, perhaps, been a relatively insignificant stain on your reputation, but the implications of TotalTalk in its current state could well be a legal, financial, and regulatory liability that not even AOL could wobble away from.

Disclaiming that the absence of power or broadband access might mitigate your liabilities in those situations. But, for example, I have neither absence. In fact, my Netgear AOL VoIP terminal adapter and router has misleadingly hummed along with a glowing, solid green light over the “telephone 1″ icon. Unsurprisingly, picking up the phone and dialing 911 resulted in an unusual disconnect tone.

Had there been a legitimate emergency, AOL might have had luck on its side, in that I knowingly (temporarily?) canceled my service, and perhaps I might have foreseen that 48 hours was an incredibly optimistic promise on AOL’s behalf. Yet, what if a technical glitch, not entirely unlike the one I’m facing, struck a larger percentage, or even all of your TotalTalk subscriberbase? That absolutely would be a deadringer for a class action lawsuit if I’ve ever heardtell of one.

TotalTalk holds much promise (like all of AOL’s services do, or did, at least at one point in time). Yet, it seems to be burdened by an organisational structure that even your own call centre representatives are baffled by. This may be the norm, and might even resemble a “functioning” enterprise at AOL Proper, but TotalTalk is in a different world entirely… TotalTalk is a service your users could reasonably (if naïevely, even foolishly) depend on in a life-threatening situation.

This is not an issue AOL can file away or otherwise ignore. Doing so would absolutely be the one mistake that might well mark the end of AOL’s era.

Justen Deal