AT&T: Another Terrible Telephone

Today’s post was originally supposed to be about going to the bank and how multi-billion dollar institutions can’t spare a few thousand bucks to make the customer experience even remotely palatable. However, that post has been, well, postponed. The reason being that an altercation with AT&T, the provider of Web and phone access at my office, has consumed my brain cycles for the day and, if this blog is to double as therapy (without the hourly expense), then this is where I start.

Before BellSouth was purchased by AT&T, they provided a pretty good product. Sure, their prices were higher and their service was slower, but they had a good customer service reputation and this really shined in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, when BellSouth connections were online weeks before Cox, the cable company, even got on the ground.

Plenty of people were happy to pay more for BellSouth, simply because they had reliable service and didn’t screw over their customers. However, once the big guys came into town and bought out the company, things changed quickly. AT&T shifted much of the focus to selling bundles and trying to own every aspect of their customer’s digital life. Where BellSouth was a phone and Internet company primarily, AT&T is a phone, Internet, cable, cell phone and wireless company. You get the feeling that they would sell Wacky Waving Inflatable Arm Flailing Tube Men if they could find a way to bundle it with your phone access.

The problem is that the cable companies tried this and service went downhill (not that it had much lower to go) and the same is happening now to AT&T. But AT&T is spread across more markets and is stretched even thinner than the cable companies. The result: Stories like mine.

How to Lose a 5-year Customer In Ten Minutes

I rent office space from a close friend and an area attorney. He had a back room that was empty, I needed a place to go to get away from the house to work. It was a natural arrangement. He had, up until today, used BellSouth and then AT&T for his phones, Web access and fax line. He paid a decent sum of money and, in recent months started looking to cut back.

He first severed the fax line after switching to an eFax service and then sought to switch to a lower grade DSL. However, it was around that time that Cox cold called him and quoted him a price about seventy dollars per month lower than his current rate. Not ready to commit, he called AT&T and told them what he was offered and they promised to match it when his contract expired in a month.

So, in a month, he called back and got the package deal they mentioned and things seemed great. Then the next month’s bill came and it was at the original price. He called and questioned it, but was told that billing ran one month behind. However, when the next month’s bill was the same price, he complained again and, once more, was told to wait another month.

When the third bill was the same price, he crunched the numbers and it appeared, to him at least, that the price he was quoted did not include the Internet access. He called, demanded the price he was quoted. He wrangled with the representatives for some time but was eventually forced to hang up after the rep couldn’t even locate his phone number.

This came to a head yesterday, a Sunday, when I drove to the office to do some writing. I found that the Web access was out completely. However, since we’d had some bad weather recently, I figured it was just another outage and went home. Today, the Monday after, the access was still out.

It took a few back and forth calls but it turns out that someone interpreted the last exchange as “Disable all Internet access on Jan. 3rd” and they did so, even though the account was paid in full. The kicker was that they could not reactivate the account right then and, instead, it would take three days to get it back online. In the meantime, the office is completely useless to me (all of my work is on the Web) and my friend is severely diminished in his capacity.

At this point, we were both steamed beyond belief. My friend immediately called Cox and signed a contract with them, we should have our Web back up through AT&T in a few days, but will be on Cox within a week. Sure, Cox historically has had worse service than AT&T, but they never tried to screw anyone or play games. They just mess up the old fashioned way.

It’s sad when that’s the competitions selling point and its successful.

Double Trouble

The problem for me is that I was a potential future AT&T customer. My contract with Sprint is up in March, I’ve been looking closely at the iPhone and my wife and I had done the math, if we went with AT&T and bundled everything, we would have saved about 40 dollars per month. In a year in which we’re trying to get out of debt for good, that could be a huge difference.

Now though, I’m about to have a serious talk with her about the possibility of skipping it altogether, forgetting the iPhone, getting a Blackberry and going with Verizon or someone else. The fact is that AT&T quoted a price and, when my friend tried to hold them to it, they disconnected his Internet access. Maybe it was a horrible miscommunication, maybe a rogue salesperson crossed a line, but that was the end result and it seems AT&T is in no rush to fix the problem.

Bottom Line

My friend had been a customer with AT&T and BellSouth for over four years, giving them thousands and thousands of dollars not just in service, but in advertising purchases in their phone books. He was a gold mine for them, a small business that still had a use for phone book advertising. Yet, now he’s gone. As he said, they’ve seen the last penny from him and they might never see a penny from me either.

The sad thing is that, normally, when I hear about a customer having trouble with a large company, I tend to side with the company more often than not. Most cases of companies “screwing” customers is a classic case of the customer not knowing what they’re doing, asking the wrong questions and looking like an idiot. Should companies do more to educate, sure, but still it is up to the buyer to beware and get their own facts.

However, not only was I there for many of the conversations, but my friend is an attorney and attorneys keep excellent notes. I’ve read his notes on all of the calls and have to agree with his conclusions. He might have heard wrong, but this is not something he has a habit of doing in my experience.

No, I’m afraid that AT&T screwed this one up pretty bad, there’s not much of a way around it. I don’t think they’re a bad company for making a mistake, nor do I think they are one for making a series of mistakes, what worries me is that all of this has gone on without so much as an “I’m Sorry”, just a coordinated effort to delay and confuse. They didn’t even try to keep him as a customer.

So, I need to check myself and see if I’ll have to sell my soul to go with AT&T and, if so, how much my soul is really worth. Because. unless AT&T can convince me otherwise, there seems to be a new price for me to bear.