I am very disappointed with AT&T, especially their pathetic billing system. On Saturday my wife and I went into a local AT&T retail store so that I could purchase her an IPhone 6 plus for Mother’s Day. They pulled up our account, and low and behold it showed up as past due. We have AT&T’s awesome combined billing, however it turns out it’s not so awesome…… We had paid our most recent invoice, my wife verified that it had been paid on 5/1/15, debited from our bank account (we do online banking) on 5/4/15, however the wireless portion of the invoice said that it was past-due since mid-April. It took almost 2 hours to get this resolved, and I was as close as I’ve ever been to getting rid of all my AT&T services, especially with Verizon’s store across the street from where we were at.
I’ve been a wireless & wireline Customer since 1992 (formerly BellSouth), and between all the services, my annual run-rate with them is around $5,000. I’m a former BellSouth director, and have always wanted to keep my services with the company, however this was almost it for me. To say I was frustrated is an understatement. What started out as wanting to do something for my wife, turned into a ridiculous waste of our time. Fortunately the gentleman that was working with us (Sam) had the foresight to contact Customer Retention and after a period of time, pleading with them that they were about to lose a long-term Customer, was able to get this resolved. He should be credited for going above and beyond in saving the account. I was fortunately able to get her the new phone, however it by no means should have been this difficult because of a screwed up billing system.
This by far is not my only issue with AT&T Wireless, just the most recent. As a former engineering director, I especially love it when I call Tech Support. It’s a mixed bag as to whether I get a qualified support person, or someone who’s reading off of a laminated placard relative to “helping” me with my problem. A few months ago when they were obviously working on LTE in my area, the coverage dropped at my home to a point where it was difficult to keep a call up. I do telecom consulting, so my mobile is my work number, so if I can’t carry on a conversation with a Client, I have issues. Cutting to the chase, it took a week’s worth of calls, dealing with various and sundry tech support personnel, and after being told there wasn’t an issue in my area (my neighbors were experiencing the same coverage issues), I finally got hold of a tech support person in Texas that saw the problem, and said they’d have it looked into. After a week or so more, the problem persisted, I called Customer Service again, ended up with an individual that was more than happy to have me go out and purchase an AT&T micro-cell so that I could get the coverage I was previously getting prior to their RF Optimization folks working on the local cell site, so I asked this person if they were kidding me. After a couple more conversations with “Customer Service”, they finally agreed that the problem was theirs, and they sent me a micro-cell.
The saga clearly continues…….