Here is an interesting article about AOL’s retention manual that was just posted online. It is quite interesting to see the lengths that they go to keep customers from leaving their service. This could be thought of as a cautionary tale on how NOT to provide good customer service. I was invited to present at the ISPCon Baltimore event this past spring, and at that event Earthlink gave a keynote explaining how they are getting into municipal wireless and the presentation showed how they expect to roll those wireless plans out. That presentation also showed their unbelievable subscriber losses over the last couple of years to broadband rivals. When the chart was extended at the current rate of customer loss, Earthlink would basically have ZERO subscribers by sometime in 2008. Based on what Earthlink showed in that presentation, it is probably a safe guess that AOL’s losses are even worse. AOL forecasted losing HALF of their 17.7 MILLION subscribers over the next three years, but I think that is conservative.