From the EDge

My home, that is. I believe you may be in the telephone business and probably could actually call customers! –More on that later. I have enjoyed AT&T U-Verse service and would not discourage anyone from subscribing, but be VERY careful about the billing relationship. Let’s start with some good news. I have no photo or video of anyone sleeping on my couch. I will end with a high note about the lack of any need for that.

Suddenly about noon my AT&T service stopped. I thought there must be some new install in the neighborhood or some minor network issue. I had dial tone on my phone so I figured there was not some catastrophic problem. Since I rarely use it to make calls, I did not even try—that might have been a clue! All of a sudden it hit me. The threatening letters to disconnect service were to be effective about this time of the month. I had not been concerned since we had paid online within the last two weeks after some considerable confusion previously about arranging for U-Verse to be paid. I would say we have been getting threatening letters since the service was installed 7 months ago, so what was another.

But with the realization that those threatening letters could have been fulfilled, I looked up the last threatening letter and yes, it threatened that service could be discontinued, so just maybe I better call to see if this may be what happened. Well of course that was it!

AT&T has every reason to believe I am a deadbeat customer so I can certainly see the problem—NOT. Let me check, I have been an AT&T (and predecessors) customer all my life and never had a problem about paying bills. I have had the same phone number for over 30 years, not to mention a second line. I have had DSL service for years. Of course they may not recognize I also have two mobile phones from them. I am definitely a customer who could leave them and not pay at a moment’s notice. And on top of all that, they knew we had previously been having troubles getting the e-payment correct, and I later discover that this is a repeated story of others.

So there I am talking to some poor representative who has to deal with me in a state I don’t wish to be in, and now she doesn’t either. She verifies that my bill is overdue and indeed my service has been shut-off. How could this be we just paid? I was then amazed that in a few seconds she could verify that the e-payment was still incorrectly applied to my old landline account, where she found a surplus of some $230 credit. If she could discover this in less than a minute, do you think that there might be some policy to discover what accounts are being disconnected? Could anyone have discovered that AT&T did have payment but there was a billing confusion? Could it be possible to make a phone call to see if there was a problem we were aware of? Have they heard of email? Instant messaging? Text messaging? Twitter? Oh no, that is Comcast that has learned about Twitter. How about when your competition is using new service tools, that you better discover what that is about?

The final recovery: I did expect that there should be no penalty for restarting service and that was resolved without even a request. My tone of voice made that request unsaid. I was astonished that the incorrect payment could be found immediately. For clarity the origin of this whole mess is that my phone bill is paid in California (where I live) and U-Verse is paid in Illinois, I assume for everyone. I was told that some e-payments could not be arranged to them, which seems hard to believe. This must be a widespread point of confusion for customers.

I am trying to deal with the shock that restoring service could take up to 24 hours. Since this is my life line to the world, I could not imagine that something so simple could be that complicated especially when it took only a minute to discover the payment error. Towards the end of my call I did get a call center incoming call. It was then I realized that AT&T would not want to disrupt the billing of call centers to reach me. ( I blogged previously that I do not answer my legacy phone unless I see a known Caller ID.) While I was ranting to the beleaguered agent about receiving irritating calls while my service was disconnected she hung-up on me. Then MIRACULOUSLY within two minutes my service was restored.

I am supposed to be grateful that this was easily restored—and I am. Maybe I should be impressed that no one fell asleep on my couch, but AT&T this is NO way to run a business. You were supposed to get over being a monopoly long ago. Delivering somewhat state of the art services should be some sort of influence to use technology in the customer relationship part of business. Look at this one angry stupid phone that still has me cranked up. This is not the kind of animated customers a business needs. Thank-you for restoring my service in two minutes—after irritating me for a few hours and making me wonder, is anyone thinking there?