thilly thenny

It’s utterly ridiculous that I just spent 45:53 minutes on the phone with AT&T to discuss extraneous roaming charges that showed up on my bill.

It took 30 minutes just to get someone on the phone and load his system because it’s been down (I’m talking 12:00AM on Monday morning).  Once I challenged the rep that it’s not possible (AT&T isn’t so stupid) that AT&T’s account system is completely off the grid and they probably staggered the updates across call centers, he said “Oh, let me check on that.”

After another 10 minutes of having completely different account information, I asked and found that the representative had the wrong person’s account information on his screen.

Once we were on the same page, checking the wrong charges, correcting them and crediting my account the $22.20 took a whole of 5 minutes.

Thanks for wasting 40 minutes of my life!

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The reason I’m ranting isn’t because AT&T sucks and should go to hell.  In fact, quite the opposite.  I want AT&T to be successful.  I’ve been with the company for 8 years now, from AT&T to Cingular back to AT&T.  I’ve been with them for 3 years of DSL/phone service.  In general, I’m pretty happy with the service (okay, minus the dozens of dropped calls on my cell and that one stint of my modem not working).

What I do want is for AT&T to have better presence.

• Besides the measly 4 updates on their Twitter, have Twitter accounts for your wireless (even separated by region/types of service/whatever), phone and internet.  Interact with your clients, and when ish like what happened to me tonight, have someone who can talk me down from screaming at my phone- which I try my best not to do because the rep is more helpful when you’re not pissed off.  Or better yet, solve the problem from the back end.
• Publicize those user forums and have community managers, so that customers can help each other.  I don’t exactly know how deals work (some people pay less for more) but… if user forums save even a fraction of a percent of calls to call centers, that’s a huge cost saving.
• Update your servers.  There is NO reason a customer should wait that long for a rep to pull his/her information.  <Insert old marketing cliche that keeping a customer costs a lot less than acquiring a new one.>
• Start “Your World, Your Voice.“  Make it a virtual suggestion box of making AT&T work better for their customers.

I’m sick of friends teasing me about having AT&T.  I want to be proud. Congrats, Verizon & Comcast, for doing a great job.  But I don’t want to make the network switch just yet.

So AT&T, will you try to help me stay?