Who and What is TELCO?

@litzdog911

Thank you for not treating me like an (Edited per community guidelines). It doesn't take a genius to figure out that TELCO would stand for telephone company. Perhaps my question was too complicated. I've never heard of TELCO, telephone company, and to suddenly be told that I will NEVER work with Directv again, and that I need to call AT&T for ALL THINGS=phone, DirecTV issues, i.e. dish, programming issues, unknown messages on my TV screen right after the live program simply STOPS, AND without any notification makes me very angry. The first CSR I spoke with, which would be the DirectV phone #, could not find my account, so she asked me "What kind of phone do you have?" I wondered if she meant the brand name, make & model. Finally, she told me that ALL LANDLINES, which is what I have would be handled by a new phone number. She didn't even tell me the name attached to this new phone #, I had to ask. When I called AT&T the CSR couldn't find my account either.

DirectV and/or AT&T treated me like a non-existent person. No thank you for being with us for upteen years. I went back through my statements, NO MESSAGE REGARDING TELCO. NO STATEMENT saying my bill will now be AUTOMATICALLY switched to paperless, then to be told I was the one who SWITCHED IT TO PAPERLESS.

Paper or paperless is optional, but there was a push awhile ago to move everyone to paperless unless they chose not to. Notice should have been with the bill in the months prior to the change, unfortunately too often these notices are skipped over (if the bill is even looked at in the first place).

DirecTV customer support number hasn't changed and still has their own departments as is a separate provider from other AT&T services, though they have the same parent owner. They have been working on more and more agents to cover both sides, but per the uniqueness of the services and how many there are I find that to be overshooting what can be done.

Within the last year or so, AT&T has been migrating DirecTV accounts to a new billing account system. This is a system designed to work with other AT&T systems as the old one was too different to fully communicate with the other. Most likely the agent who couldn't find your account probably only had access to the one system. If that happens again I would ask to speak to a RC1 specialist who should be able to access both account systems (for as long as the old system remains accessible even in possibly a "read only" state).

We weren't questioning your intelligence on the term Telco. It is not a common term outside of internal business. So we were just answering your topic question "Who and What is Telco?".

It is still our recommendation to call specifically the side of the service you are dealing with. Supposedly if you call AT&T they can transfer you to the DirecTV side or vice versa, but transfers between the sides have not had a good track record. So I would still call the company specific numbers as normal to be on the safe side.

TELCO = Telephone Company. Just a business abbreviation.

Though AT&T does own DirecTV, in addition to U-Verse and AT&T TV Now (formally Directv Now), they have separate support lines.

So for DirecTV specific issues, call the DirecTV number. For AT&T phone or internet, or their U-Verse TV, you call them. For AT&T TV Now, their support is online only.

And nobody is guaranteed to know ALL the answers to ALL your questions. They are only human, not omniscient. If they don't know the answer then they should be able to look it up, find out from a fellow employee, or transfer you to a specific department if needed, unless it is a very unusual question of course. And some home setups are so custom, or deal with 3rd party equipment, that other customers who have those setups are more knowledgeable than an employee who might have just a simple setup.

Mr. Juniper,

You are a a poor example of an Award for Community Excellence. This is a BLOG, correct? This is where I attempt to find out what's going on in Directv World. Your response is ignorant and self-serving. I called DirecTV to find out why I hadn't received my bill, but before I called, being the smart being that I am, I got online to see if I could find out what was going on. That is when I knew I wasn't going to receive a bill because of a little green check mark with a comment saying I had changed to paperless billing. I KNEW I had NOT changed to paperless billing. That's when I called the Directv phone #.

Frankly, your last paragraph makes absolutely no sense to me. I called regarding my bill.

This is a public customer to customer forum. So like many other customers here, I am providing information that I hope will help or at least point in the right direction. Sorry you did not like my post, but certainly no reason to be hostile.

As for my last paragraph not making sense, it was a realistic perspective to the last comment in your original post "...whoever answers better know ALL of the answer to ALL of my questions."

Thank you so much Mr/Mrs Sandblaster for that informative line about logging into my account and changing back to paper billing. When I see that something major has changed on my bill, I call...yes I could have changed it myself, but then I wouldn't know why it had been changed, or who changed it, or anything about TELCO, the telephone company that I am now suppose to contact.