AT&T – FAIL!

13 Jan 2010

Every time I’m involved in a discussion about failed customer service it reminds me of my experiences with AT&T Wireless. And every time I wish I’d my experiences in a public place so I could give out a link and not have to talk about it anymore.

Today I spent an hour and seven minutes on the phone with AT&T to fix something that should have taken just a few minutes and I’m convinced, once again, that AT&T could not provide worse customer service if they were purposely trying to do so.

So, I’m here to detail the story of these fails so I no longer have to talk or write about them again.

Short Story

AT&T has failed miserably every time I’ve needed something.

Long Story

Bear in mind that there have been customer service reps along the way who tried desperatedly to help but I guess the system is so flawed they were left powerless. Or perhaps they are just very nice people who happen to be incompetent. In either case, I do not lay the blame for any of this on any one person.

I also have to tell you – I’ve not made any of this up and the only embellishment might be very small exagerations to the amount of time spent on the phone with AT&T, but I promise you that those are very slight.

The Original iPhone

I never owned a cell phone until the iPhone was released. The iPhone was announced and I wanted one – not needed one, *wanted* one. So, I planned to get three of them – one for me, one for my wife and one for my teenage son. I was beginning to buy the argument that teenagers *need* cell phones. My son would disagree (a lot like his old man) but he is glad he has his iPhone because, like me, he *wanted* one.

Long story short, Terri decided she didn’t want one and a client sent me one as a gift when he heard I wanted one. Setting these up was a breeze and we loved them – no issues at all. I’ve spent $499 and I service for two lines but no minimum contract.

My Wife Joins Our Plan

We decided to add Terri to the plan and get her a different kind of phone.

When all we had were iPhones on the plan, my phone was the primary line on the account but for some inexplicable reason my phone could no longer be the primary phone now that there would be a non-iPhone on the account. Well, things went downhill from there. I had to call customer service twice and work out how to get my voicemail working again because of this simple switch.

Adding Data Cards To The Mix

At this point I was doing a lot of work on location for clients and I needed a reliable way to have Internet access “on the road” so I opted to get a data card. I wanted the option to turn service on and off so I paid $299 for the card to avoid signing a contract.

The first annoyance were the emails from AT&T about text messages to me at some phone number I did not recognize. I called AT&T and learned that each card has a phone number associated with it and apparently when AT&T set up the card they forgot to disable text messages. Not long after this, a relative came to live with us and I added another data card but this time I opted for the contract. I reminded the person behind the counter to disable text messages. Now, I’ve spent $847 for equipment and I’m spending about $270/mo for service and I have two two-year contracts.

Our houseguest then breaks my data card (the one not under contract) and it cannot be repaired. So, I stop by the store to have the service stopped – no problem.

Until I get the bill. AT&T charged me a termination fee of $175. I called to complain and, of course, I’m on the phone for almost an hour until I’m talking to someone who understands my problem. Sure enough, they remove the termination fee but in some kind of number changing confusion they end up disabling the data card that actually works. In the process, I start getting those annoying “we sent you a text message” emails again. Another phone call clears this up after only thirty minutes or so on the phone.

The iPhone 3G

Billy and I get up at 6a.m. and head to the Apple store with Billy’s HD video camera. The plan is to wait in line for the new phone if the line if not very long but to shoot some video if it is. When we arrive there are 16 people in line so we get in line. We enjoyed our time in line very much and the free coffee and donuts. Thank you very much Apple.

We meet with an “iPhone Specialist” at 8:16 and by 8:25 we are ready to activate the phones, pay for them, and get on with our day – but something has gone wrong. It’s old news that Apple had some issues keeping up with the demand for the iPhone that day but in my case the culprit was AT&T. AT&T has activated the two new iPhones and now Apple cannot ring them up because the SKU (or some number) is already marked as activated. The Apple rep gets on the phone with AT&T and we assume they can sort this out in a matter of minutes. Apparently not. After about an hour of waiting, the folks at Apple set Billy and I up at a table where I can plug in my laptop and get some work done and Billy can use an iMac and do whatever it is he does with his free time. Then they bring us some more donuts and coffee. I have to be honest – I enjoyed this day very much. It was a front row seat for all the action, free coffee, and a I got to chat with several of the employees who were intrigued by the cool stack overlays on my MacBook Pro.

During the next four hours – yep, four hours – the Apple reps kept checking in with me to tell me what was going on. Finally, they are at an impasse. AT&T insists there is nothing they can do and that I must come back another day. AT&T was blaming a lot of this on Apple’s servers, etc. and that was all they were going to do. Fortunately, one of the managers at the store had an idea – check the old iPhones. Sure enough, her suspicion was correct. The phones we had in our pockets were no longer working. AT&T had activated the new phones so my old ones did not work. She went back on the line with AT&T to fight for us.

After two more hours – I’m not kidding you – the same manager comes to me in a manner you might expect a doctor to come to you with bad news. “Mr. Soistmann, we’ve explained the situation to AT&T and unfortunately there is nothing they *WILL* do today and that means there is nothing we *CAN* do – TODAY.”

“So,” she continues, “we are just going to give you the phones.”

What? I’d actually joked with them hours ago about this. Apparently, the problem was that they couldn’t charge me for the phones because they wouldn’t ring up as a credit purchase because of the activation issue and they were not allowed to sell them for cash. I’d told them that this was not a problem – just give me the phones.

They assured me that I could activate them at home using iTunes and everything would be fine. We actually tried in the store first but by then the chaos with Apple’s servers was in full swing and it was difficult or impossible for anyone to set up a phone.

I was so pleased at this point with Apple that I totally forgot that MY WIRELESS COMPANY DIDN’T CARE THAT I COULD NOT USE MY WIRELESS PHONE AND THEY DIDN’T SEEM TO CARE WHEN I’D BE ABLE TO GET A WORKING PHONE.

We took them home and set them up. No problem.

Well, not quite. Apple’s part was easy and painless but we did need to wait until later in the evening. AT&T, however, had all kinds of issues provisioning the phones properly – especially my son’s. To compound the issue AT&T tried to blame every bit of it on Apple every time I called. About 40 hours after I’d come home with the phones they were working properly.

And then Apple called me. There must have been other issues similar to mine and AT&T was insisting that a transaction be recorded for every single phone (at least that’s the way Apple told the story – my suspicion is that this had something to do with Apple’s own record keeping). If I did not come into the store that day my phones would be disabled. Billy and I both went the Apple store where they gave us two new phones and two $500 gift cards to pay for them. Another hour at the store and, of course, more phone calls to AT&T to make the phones work right.

Then We Went To Italy

I was taking the family to Italy to celebrate Terri’s birthday. She wanted to go somewhere, I’d always wanted to see Italy, and her birthday fell on Easter, so Italy was it. I rented an apartment in Rome for Easter weekend (4/10 – 4/12) and a house in Bagni di Lucca for the following 14 days. The house had Internet access but the apartment didn’t. I didn’t plan to work that much but I needed Internet access.

I needed to adjust our calling plans and text messaging for overseas anyway so I called AT&T to get it all set up. My data card had a plan that was unlimited data for $60 per month. They offered me a plan that was $120 per month and it would be 5Gb total in Italy and a few other countries and only 100Mb in the U.S. I told them to set it up for 4/10.

We arrived in Rome and settled in. Later that day I checked my email and did a few things to check on pending projects. The next day I used the card a few times to browse the web and play around a little while waiting for the family to prepare for our first day out in Rome. I would have guessed it was less than 10 Mb of transfer.

The next morning the card wouldn’t work and my phones were not working either. I spent several hours on the phone with AT&T and I don’t remember all the details but I do know the following:

1. They did not switch me to the international plan until 4/11. They thought that would make sense since that synced with my billing cycle. Well, isn’t that nice?

2. They had a record of 6.8 Mb of transfer on 4/10 and 4/11 – seemed about right for what I did on those days.

3. They also had a record of some ridiculous amount of transfer from before all of this. To this day, I have no idea how that usage ended up on my card.

4. The fees for number three were so high that AT&T had turned off my service.

After spending more than an hour on the phone with several different people, they told me they’d straightened it out and everything was fine.

Until I got home and tried to switch back to my original plan. AT&T no longer offers an unlimited plan for data cards and they wouldn’t let me back on it. I was furious with them. I called, wrote letters, visited a few stores – no one could do anything to help me. Before I left for Italy I went out of my way to discuss my options with AT&T. I’d called three separate times to see what plan would be best. I explained to them that I only needed international coverage for two days. I told them that I would probably leave it on that plan while in Italy but I certainly didn’t *need* it the whole time. They assured me that I’d be able to get back on my plan and that the international plan would even be pro-rated for the time I had it on. They, on the other hand, did not have the courtesy to tell me that THEY DO NOT HAVE THAT PLAN ANYMORE. If I had known they didn’t offer that plan anymore I would have opted to leave my card alone and find another solution – an Internet cafe, pay the charges for the few Mb I needed, something else.

I’m still not sure how they can even do this. I signed a contract for two years for unlimited data per month for $60 per month. I have to stick to that or pay a termination fee but they don’t need to stick to it? Now they tell me my card will still cost $60 a month and I’m still bound by my contract but I only get 5Gb of transfer per month. I fought and fought with them and they wouldn’t budge. I called back several different times and spoke with supervisors and mangers – still they wouldn’t give in. I decided I’d have to live with it.

Then I got a bill for almost $2000. I’d been billed for every minute of usage on that card at international rates and for many more minutes that I didn’t even use. They were even billing me for data transfer from 4/12 when the card never worked on that day. It took me almost three hours of time on the telephone to get them to give me a credit for $1165. Frankly, I have no idea if that was fair but I was sick of the whole thing.

My Daughter’s Phone Ends Up In the Washer

About three weeks ago my daughter’s phone ended up in the wash. My son has seen other phones recover from this kind of thing so we tried all the tricks to dry it out but it was dead.

So, yesterday I stopped by AT&T to get her another phone. We looked at some others but she decided on the same phone because it’s a very cool phone. If I used an upgrade it would be only $20 – excellent. Since she is not due for an upgrade, we were going to use another line for that. The clerk told me that my line was eligible for an upgrade. I told her I was wary of using that line because its an iPhone and we’ve had so much trouble getting the stupid phones provisioned as iPhones, etc. She assured me that there would be no problem. I asked her to check all the lines because Billy and I plan to use ours for the next iPhone and we want to plan the dates properly. Turns out he and my wife were also eligible. We asked her to use my wife’s line to keep things simpler when we go to use our upgrades. Her only concern was that this was a 2G iPhone and she thought we might have to do something in iTunes to make iPhone-specific features work. We did the switch and I called my wife to ensure that the phone still worked and we planned to check out the iTunes fix later.

The next day my wife noticed she did not have Internet access on her phone so we connected it to iTunes and saw no indication of what to do. We checked the voicemail feature and, sure enough, it was not working (which we were expecting in this case). So I called AT&T. I spent six minutes on hold and then spent 39 minutes talking to someone who was very nice but could not figure out how to fix the voicemail. She noticed that the phone did not have a data plan and it took her ten minutes to find the unlimited plan for the phone. Finally, she transferred me to technical support. Ten minutes on hold with them and twelve minutes with the tech and everything was fixed. From what I could tell he did exactly what she had tried but for some reason it worked.

To be fair, I kept the first rep on the phone longer than necessary because I was paranoid about the account changes which I didn’t realize were necessary – did my daughter’s phone now errantly have the wrong data plan? and other questions like that.