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Friday, May 1st, 2015 2:21 AM

Who do I talk to about customer service?

A quick background of myself:  I was recently offered a new position for business intelligence and began an adventure from our home in Rexburg, Idaho down to Las Vegas (to visit family as we were in between houses) and on to Austin, Texas to start work in the upcoming month.  My wife and three daughters have liked Texas so far, at least until we had to deal with AT&T to set up internet/tv.

I started at about 3:30 this afternoon on my application online to schedule setup of our service in our new home that we move into tomorrow.  I did a change of address through USPS and was given an offer of a $300 visa through AT&T for new service and an additional $100 for doing it online.  When attempting to go to the att.com/doitnow address that the email told me to go to, nothing worked as though the forms were broken and the website was not created properly by the developer (could have also been a server issue).

 

 

I decided I would forget about the promo and try things myself through AT&T's website!  After finally selecting everything that I wanted and moved on to the checkout page. Immediately a popup window for chat showed up asking me for my address so they could help me.  I went in to the chat and was connected with "Melanie".  This person took an extremely long time to answer any questions and at one point told me she was going to check on something and came back 10 minutes later to ask if I was ready to proceed with the next step (she didn't even check up on the thing she had mentioned).  After spending a dreadfully long time with her, giving her all of my information and in an attempt to set up my account, she let me know that she couldn't actually help me set up my account and that I would need to do that online.

Annoyed that I wasted so much time with this person who was obviously using a translator they found online to try and understand everything I was typing to her, I proceeded to try and order through the website.  I submitted my information and there was a problem with the submission and it referred me to a number that I needed to call.

Now speaking with a woman in the Phillipines who claimed to be named "Ashley" or "Sarah" (can't remember which since the names aren't real and obviously made up) and to be "stationed in Pennsylvania" I was asked to start over from the very beginning by giving all of the same information that I gave to both the lady in chat and the AT&T online form that failed.  I went ahead and gave it to her since she seemed to be really nice.  When near the end of the setup she said that the earliest the technician could be at my house was going to be the 11th of May (today being April 30th).  I told her that I would like an earlier date and she asked me to hold while she got the technician on the phone so that we could schedule something earlier. 

After waiting 10 minutes I was transferred to another lady that had no clue why I was even talking to her. She was rude and short with me on the phone as though I had wronged her somehow by talking to her.  She asked me about 5 times (I couldn't understand her at all) for the phone number of the person who I was talking to which I eventually was able to find online and give to her.  She called the lady and put her into a three way phone call with me and the two employees who began bickering back and forth about how the first lady didn't know how to change the technician date to an earlier date and the other lady who was basically saying that if she wanted it to happen that she would need to give her the account so she could set it up (thus taking the credit/pay I'm guessing).  The first lady wasn't willing to give up a customer she had been working hard on to land as a sale and asked again for the other one to help her out.  The second lady started getting SUPER rude and basically started saying the same thing over again while insulting the first ladie's intelligence. 

Mind you, all of this was while I'm on the phone with them.  They fought back and forth until finally the first lady kicked the second one off of the phone, told me that I would have my install on the 11th and then HUNG UP THE PHONE!!!

I waited for about 10 minutes for her to call back while browsing plans online of what I could get setup before I realised that it wasn't going to happen.  During this time I got an email stating that my service would be set up on the 11th.  There was a button that said I could change the date, so I changed it to the 5th because that was the earliest time they had.  It's pretty sad when the customer can figure something out faster than an employee.

After all of this had happened I had been dealing with AT&T for about 3.5 hours.  I was so disgusted with the service that I thought it was neccessary to speak with a manager.  I called AT&T up again to try and speak with a manager (which I asked for to be an American).  I Was put on hold for 10 minutes before handed off to yet another Asian outsourced person, this time a man.  I told him I wanted to speak to an American and he said that he would be taking care of me.  I told him a second time I wanted an American and he got annoyed and said "fine, but you'll have to hold".  He came back to tell me that the hold time was going to be about 20 minutes.  50 minutes later I was finally transferred to a person in Arizona that was American.

The person in Arizona was named Isaiah  who was the most helpful and understanding person I've spoken with in a long while as far as customer service over a phone is concerned.  He was funny, yet very professional.  He stuck to protocol as directed, but was very honest in his apologies for the people that I had to deal with.  He didn't say a single negative thing about the other employees (since that's against the company rules and also because it would be distasteful) and was focused on what could resolve my issues. 

 

He did everything he could, but ultimately couldn't help me in the way I needed because he was not the customer service manager that I thought I was going to get transferred to by the guy in Asia. I felt bad for Isaiah that he had to deal with all of this mess when he was so helpful and obviously cared about the customer whereas the other outsourced people didn't.

The point in me writing this is to tell AT&T that I plan to call up and cancel my service because of the most attrocious customer service I've ever experienced in my 30 years on God's green earth.  The reason I wrote specifically about Isaiah is because he is the type of person you should be training all of your customer service reps to be like.  With more representatives like him, you would be keeping many more customers and able to handle calls more effectively.  I would gladly wait an hour to speak with someone like Isaiah than 4 hours to get nowhere with outsourced employees.

Even though I'm not a huge fan of your competitors, I'm going to have to call them up simply because I never want to have to talk with customer service in Asia and get treated like that again.

I searched online for a corporate email and ended up taking this forum as the next best thing.  I hope that someone here can forward this on to Corporate.

Thanks.

 

[Edited for privacy-please do not post personal or unique information such as but not limited to full names, employee ID numbers, email addresses, phone numbers, account numbers, etc.]

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10 years ago

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