I’m not one to make a lot of noise and definitely not one to raise hell in my blog. The first AT&T Hell post can be found here. More than two weeks later we still have not heard from our account manager who could at least apologize for whatever business losses we suffered from being offline for a whole day. As someone from the service industry, think that calling your customer to follow up after a disaster like this and making sure that your client isn’t shopping around for your replacement is critical action on the part of the account manager.
I’ve done this many times in my past life as an account manager for our staffing clients: I screwed up. No, it’s not anyone else’s fault and I know I wasn’t there and I know I didn’t do it, but it’s MY fault. Because I’m your account manager it is my responsibility to make sure that you are getting the service I (or my company) said I was going to deliver. I am just calling to let you know that I have escalated this issue to our corporate leadership to make sure that this doesn’t happen again.
But no, no phone call from our so-called account manager. I spoke to another one of my friends there a couple of days later who just said “why didn’t you call me? I could’ve gotten some senior people involved to get you guys back online.” But the thing was, why do I have to pull personal favors from friends to get a service that we are paying good money for?
My contact then proceeded to take the story down and promised to get some sort of resolution for this issue. Maybe some reimbursement of some sort for the tech we had to call to investigate the issue because AT&T wouldn’t/couldn’t (whatever the case was) send one. My friend said that he has escalated the issue and that I should be getting a phone call the next day.
Did I get a call? Nope.
The indifference on the part of AT&T is just unacceptable.
I’m reading stuff around the Blogosphere about just how unhappy residential and business customers are about AT&T’s service. I keep talking about doing an AT&T Hell campaign to effect change but some shrug their shoulders and point out they’re too big to care. If we switched providers, AT&T still owns the landlines and by switching you’re basically just signing up with a middleman (I don’t know much about the telecommunication industry) so we’re basically screwed.
Call me naive but I still think that if AT&T hears enough voices and they just might see the benefit in paying more attention to their users.
I’m gonna work on an AT&T Hell Digest here and gather some posts. Did I miss yours? Please leave me a comment or email me so that I can make sure to link.
Doug Karr’s company also suffered from an outage.
Thomas Han tries to demistify the sudden increase in his AT&T bill.
This isn’t new, but here’s a collection of Google search results on keywords “at&t activation hell” mostly on iPhone activation woes. “2007-09-12T02:31:03+00:00″>
More AT&T woes
More hell courtesy of AT&T customer support from Bread Coffee Chocolate Yoga blog.
