AT&T: Systematic Incompetency (long & boring)

The BBQ Pit
1

Systematic incompetency; I can think of no other phrase that adequately describes my decade-long experience dealing with AT&T. Every single contact for over 10 years - bar none - has resulted in AT&T failing to do even the most basic things correctly on the first attempt. Folks, I am talking about dozens of company interactions over the years, and not a single fucking one has ever gone right.

A briefish history of our relationship: I signed up about 12 years ago for their toll-free service (Keep In Touch or some-such name), touted as a way of having a PERSONAL (remember this word; you’ll be tested later) toll-free number for distant family and loved ones to call you on. You pay the 15 cents a minute so your parents/kids/deadbeat brother don’t have to, encouraging them to call you more than once a year.

You have your toll-free number ring to whatever “real” phone number you like, such as your home phone. If you want to change the number it rings to, you call AT&T and simply let them know and they would take care of it. Except they wouldn’t. Every single time I called them to have the number re-routed (maybe every year or two), it always took two or three calls to get it done. The people answering the phone always sound helpful and always express that it is “no problem”, but nothing ever actually happened unless you called several times (waiting a few days in between each, to let it “rise”).

In the midst of all this, one time I wanted the number to ring to my mobile phone. “We can’t do that”, said AT&T. “Why not? It’s just like any other number.” I asserted. No dice. I finally was able to make it happen simply by not revealing to them that it was my mobile number. Schmucks.

Still, day-to-day, the service worked, technically. I think the per-minute charges reduced to .07 or .10, so as long as it worked, I wasn’t going to rock the boat too much, since I didn’t have to actively deal with AT&T all that often.

Until I started noticing $85 charges on my Amex bill from AT&T for several months. Now, I charge a LOT of things on my business Amex, and there are a lot of recurring charges on there, so for awhile this was under my “WTF is that” RADAR. When I finally started to question what I was paying AT&T almost $1,000 a year for, I called them. Naturally, this took several calls and lots of contradictory responses. You see…I was only getting the charge on my Amex bill…I was not receiving any sort of AT&T invoice or billing statement. Eventually, they figured out that the charges were for my toll-free service. “But I only have about 45 minutes of calls a month!” I said. “Well, yes, but there are minimums” they replied. Funny…since the inception of my AT&T toll-free service, there had NEVER been an account fee (besides usage) beyond maybe two bucks.

Somewhere along the line they just decided to raise my monthly bill from about $4 a month to about $85 without my consent. When I inquired as to how I could get back to a sane AT&T toll-free plan, they stated that they only offer toll-free service to businesses on an AT&T business plan, and to have such a plan would be $131 a month! The savings just keep adding up! They’re telling me that my modest little toll-free service - originally pushed as a PERSONAL feature - is now only available to businesses, and that you could only get that by being a full service AT&T customer.

But I knew better. See, I already had been using toll-free service from TelCan for my business, and I only pay about $5 a month for all my usage and fees. “I’ll fire AT&T!” I exclaim. I’ll just transfer my toll-free number to Telcan.

And then things went bad. Crazy, throw-your-PC-monitor-at-the-wall-bad. I knew they were incompetent, but I had no idea just how much.

Telcan, of course, would need some sort of proof that I “own” the toll-free number I’m trying to switch to them; perfectly reasonable request. But since I wasn’t getting any sort of bill or statement from AT&T, I had nothing to provide. Would AT&T provide me a bill, or something…anything? “You can register your account online and print out statements”, she said. “Cool!” I naively blurted.

But to register on ATT’s Web site you need your account number (got that) and a Registration Code, and said Registration Code can only be obtained by inputting your date and amount of your last bill. See the Helleresqueness of this? If I had the damn bill, I wouldn’t need the Registration Code!

Another (maybe #7 in this series) call to AT&T gets me the last billing date and amount (but they can’t give out Registration Codes, which apparently are kept in Dick Cheney’s office safe). I also verify my account telephone number with them. I input the information on AT&T’s registartion Web site, choose the option to have their automated system call me with the code at the number on file with them, and wait. And wait. Days later, nothing.

I wait about 5 days and repeat the process. No phone call.

Today I get a Registration Code in the mail. Fine! Whatever! I’ll take it! I go to their site, and enter the code: 98ZVlr9c. Wait…that fifth character…is that…an L? 1? I? Upper or lower-case variant? By now, I’m really freaking boiling, because as someone that designs and writes this sort of software, every moron with more than a month’s experience knows you don’t use ambiguous characters for codes or license plates and similar items. Clearly, their entire Web development effort is the spawn of Coke Rewards and zug.com.

After numerous guesses, I finally get to the next screen. Enter my name, address, blah blah blah, and desired username and password (remember, we’re on day 10 of just trying to get the information necessary to begin the process of transferring away from AT&T). Press ENTER. Huh…previous screen…Oh, great, they made the Cancel button the fucking default!

Re-enter everything; click Submit. “We’re sorry…the username RAZAMORGENSTORN is taken. RAZAMORGENSTORN01 is available.”
So, like an idiot, I try RAZAMORGENSTORN01. “System unavailable…please resubmit. If problem persists, contact AT&T customer service.”

I resubmit. “We’re sorry…the username RAZAMORGENSTORN01 is taken. RAZAMORGENSTORN0101 is available.” Fine, I’ll try that. “System unavailable.”

Recurse the above for the past two hours. No further progress. And of course, once that Registration Code has been used, it is no longer valid, says AT&T, so if I’m not successful tonight, I’ll have to wait another week for another code and repeat all these steps. And probably get stuck at the same point.

And this doesn’t count the upcoming two millenia it will take AT&T to actually agree to transfer the toll-free number to Telcan. I’ve had this number for many years (it’s on cards, stationary, etc), so just cancelling AT&T outright, without a transfer, is less than ideal…although becoming more of a reality each day.

2

Geeze, and your head is still attached to your neck? See, because mine would have popped off Yosemite Sam style long ago.

Seriously, I hope that you can get it squared away.

3

Dude, I feel your pain. This may be a silly question, but in 10 years of contracts, you don’t have one piece of paper from those useless mofos with the phone number? Old contract? Original bills from years gone by?

I hope you manage to get the number changed before yout head explodes.

4

You have my sympathies. I agree they are always nice and seem so helpful but nothing gets done properly.

I have had to deal with them as well and both times, for different reasons, were a fucking nightmare.

I also noticed their change in policies with no notification. They just change them and leave old customers with their exsisting services and all is fine until you have to change that service then they seem to have no procedures in place. They just want to cancel your old service and attempt to move you to the new one but so many things have changed they can’t seem to make it work like it did before.

I notice that sort of thing when I first got DSL. I signed up for a year contract at $19.99 a month. All was good until about a year and a half later I called about some long distanace charges on my bill that should not have been there since I had no long distance service. After a long conversation they agreed to remove the charges but then noticed my DSL was not at the right price. The rate had been raised and there were now three different rates for different DSL speeds. My current service was indicated as the fastest and was close to $30 more a month. I had them change it to the lowest speed which was still $7 more a month than I was currently paying before.

Thanks AT&T for not only placing a long distance carrier on my service I did not want forcing me to call and get them removed which also resulted in an increase of my monthly bill.

I understand I was not under the $19.99 contract anymore but I got no notification of a rate change or of a speed difference. If I had not been forced to call I would probably still be on the $19.99 rate.

5

I feel the telecomms rage exhibited above (we in the UK and Ireland have NThelL to deal with) but I’m glad to hear I’m not the only one whose eyesight was unjustly punished by the frigging codes on the coke ring pulls :smack:

6

And that’s part of the surreality of the situation(s): they are pleasant, professional, and seemingly helpful on the phone (they genuinely do seem to try), but somewhere in their systems, their way of processing issues, lives the brain behind FEMA.

This is exactly the sort of thing I’ve come to expect from them.

That’s a good point. Last year we bought a fast document scanner and digitized a passle of past invoices, but there weren’t any AT&T ones for the past three years. I can check the bowels of the black hole we call our filing system, but beyond a certain point, I don’t think Telcan (the new service provider) should reasonably be expected to trust our “ownership” of a number from, say, five years ago.

The codes were bad; personally, I found their Web site (where you had to enter the codes) to be even worse. On the advice of my analyst, I’ve tried to suppress those memories, but I get nausea thinking about it, so it couldn’t have been pleasant.