Ive been an att customer for 20 years. Today my wireless phone service was suspended. It was suspended for nonpayment. That was news to me since it has been enrolled in autopay for years!!!
Here is what happened;
Last month my wife spent 40 minutes on the phone setting up a corporate discount offered through her company. In order to receive the discount, the account had to be in her name. She switched the account into her name, which I gave permission to do. Everything else was understood to be the same ( phone numbers, plan minutes, address, billing, etc). The only change was the account name holder. This seemed like a routine task.
Apparently, we needed to re-enroll in the autopay program. This was not pointed out to her at the time, and we assumed that everything would continue as before. NOT SO!!! Now I must pay my bill NOW to reinstate services. That would be fine, but, I was told I had to pay a $40 reconnection fee on my next bill!! This is unacceptable. We play by the rules, and if we had known that we needed to re-enroll in autopay we would have. The general population would agree that just simply changing the name on the account to that of your spouse would not require any extensive processes.
After speaking with several waves of ATT pawns on the phone, they have refused to waive the $40 fee. You may have had similar conversations with the monotone, robotic, policy police of the ATT army. I was pleased with the ATT phone service I was provided, but disgusted with customer service. Ironically, to be accurate, I just checked the web site and see that they actually call the department "CUSTOMER SUPPORT". Obviously, they are well aware that the word "service" shouldn't be included in their heading.
I felt like I should contact the investor relations rep, but Im sure they've heard it all before. Neither one of our phones are under contract. I will be visiting the Verizon store tomorrow. We teach our kids not to be bullies, then we set up polices, ineffective forms of dialog, and blockades that prevent common sense and good business practice from ever being possible.