On Friday March 9 at around midday, our AT&T Uverse service stopped working. As a freelance graphic designer who works at home, the internet connection is an important part of my work day, my “lifeline” to the outside world.
I immediately stepped outside and sure enough, a service man was working on the pole where our service is connected to the terminal box. I told this person that my service went dead and asked him if he possibly disconnected me. He denied any wrong-doing, saying he has nothing to do with Uverse, only the general phone lines.
Please note that this man was full of shit.
I returned to my desk, contacted AT&T customer service and was issued a service call for 5 to 9 pm Friday evening. By 9:00, no one had shown up, or even called us. I called customer service once again and was told that there was a confirmed service outage in my area and that techs were working to solve the problem. Apparently, because of the confirmed outage, the local service people won't honor service requests, the logic being that it isn't a problem they can resolve on site.
Please note that this information was given to me by a customer service representative presumably in India.
Move forward to Sunday. My neighbor, whose service was also dead, managed to get a service man to show up at her house. Being a good neighbor and a friend, she allowed me to ask the service man if he could also help me with my problem, which he did, including a lot of help from a kind customer service rep in Dallas on the phone, as well as his local manager.
Please note that I said Dallas, not India.
Here's where the whole thing becomes unbelievably maddening. The onsite service man discovered that ALL the Uverse lines (it looked like 6-7 lines from where I was standing below the terminal box) on our block were disconnected by the first service man on Friday while he was working on replacing the old terminal box with a new one. Remember that he denied any wrong-doing.
If my original service request on Friday had been honored, my service would have been repaired within a few hours of the start of the problem, and I wouldn't be writing this blog. Instead, I waited two days for SOMETHING to happened, and was only able to get the problem resolved because my neighbor demanded that AT&T send someone out.
Here's a few pieces of advice for AT&T customer service to think really hard about:
– Get rid of the totally uniformed and hard to communicate with customer service reps oversees and put a few more Americans to work who actually care about other Americans (I know this will never happen, but it just needed to be said).
– Honor all requests for service calls, even if the tech stays for 5 minutes and says there's nothing he can do. Making people wait through a four-hour window for nothing is totally unacceptable, period.
– Hire more service men and women like Robert, who repaired our problem, a man whose "care about the customer" attitude motivated him to go above and beyond the call of duty to help me restore our service when he easily could have told me to call it in and wait for the next guy to come out.
I pay AT&T a considerable amount of money each month for TV, internet, two land lines and five wireless phones. It would be nice to get a little bit more respect and better answers from their customer service department when a problem occurs.
The alternative to AT&T is Comcast, which we know from experience isn't any better. I guess we’ll stay with AT&T for the duration, bad customer service and all.
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