I spent an hour and a half in live chat with ATT yesterday, and another 45 minutes this morning, trying to access and pay a bill they keep texting me is overdue. Last month, I switched from Comcast because of Comcast's abysmal customer service. Now that looks like a big mistake. I enrolled in both ATT wireless and uverse internet, but they couldn't install ATT internet until several weeks after I started on ATT wireless. Then when they did the Internet installation, it switched my billing to a combined Unified Billing. That's great, but the wireless bill that then came due now doesn't show up online because (even a whole week after the Internet service began) there's a delay before the Unified Bill can be accessed online. During my hour and a half chatting with three different customer service reps, and dealing with the maddening number of different logins, usernames and passwords this insanely-fragmented company forces its customers to negotiate, none of the ATT reps could access the bill that ATT texts kept telling me was late. I'm trying to pay them money and their system is so lame their own people can't help me do that. This morning, I got through to a human who could access my bill, and told me how to pay it by phone dialing *729. So I call *729, sit through the annoying sales pitch and voice menu... And at the moment when the voice instruction is going to tell me how to pay by phone without the $5 they charge to give your payment info to a live operator, the voice recording cuts out, silent on what button to press. I tried again and again, no luck. Finally, I found an 800 number where I actually was able to pay with credit card. However, the system at that number shows my current wireless bill to be $0 even though they keep sending me texts saying my payment is late. So I went ahead and made a payment of $89.94, the amount the texts said I owed. Will this payment that the phone system calls a "future credit" actually go to pay the overdue bill that I just spent an afternoon and a morning trying to pay?? How can this tech company be so technologically disconnected?? Oh, and did I mention that yesterday afternoon, half an hour after spending the afternoon in marathon live chat with the ATT reps who couldn't help me pay my bill, my week-old ATT internet connection went dead? Another half hour on the phone with a very nice ATT tech guy indicated the problem is outside my house. Repair scheduled for 8 a.m.-noon today, with repeated admonishments that I must be home the entire time plus 2-3 hours while repairs are made. At 12:13 pm, the repair truck just pulled in to the driveway. There goes my Saturday, on top of Friday afternoon. The stunning thing is, NO element in this saga is the fault of any on-the-ground ATT worker (all of whom have been completely pleasant, professional, and competent). Rather, all these problems result from the poor design and lack of technological integration of ATT's higher-level components (wireless, Internet; thank goodness I don't also have more ATT services like cable or landlines) and their various billing and account access platforms. If the technicians in one of the world's biggest tech companies can't design an efficient, customer-friendly system on their own, why don't they get some ethnographers on board to tell them how customers actually use these systems and identify the frustrations and disconnects? All these problems are eminently fixable, IF ATT actually cares.
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