The past week my wife and I had been getting notices about our cellular data usage two weeks into our billng cycle.
Heres how it played out:
1. Notified at 75% of plan
2. Notified at 90% of plan
3. Notified 100% and over plan and will be charged $15 for an additional G.
4. I go online to my account and look at things and try to find out more. Fruitless.
5. Go to the chat help and explain my problem. Basically it's this. We are not using our phone
any differently this month than the months before, yet our data usage is way out of line.
6. Chatman suggested, We turn the data on and off when we enter or leave the
house.
7. I explain to him, again, I am not using the phone any differently and I am wondering why
data usage is so high this month. I tell him I have never had to turn my data on and off when
entering or leaving the house.
8. Chatman restates the "turn it on turn it off" suggestion.
We go back and forth on this a couple more times and then.
9. Chatman offers to credit my account the $15 overage fee and to give me 5G's of data.
10. I ask him is that for both phones.
11. Yes.
12. Fine, now can you tell me why my data usage is so abnormal.
13. He says it should not be a problem now that I have 5G's of data.
We go back and forth again. I am trying to find the cause of the usage. Chatman has solutions to my condition but not to the cause of my condition.
14. I ask to talk via phone with someone who may be more helpful.
15. Chatman accommodates my request and I begin a telephone conversation with another Att&t
person. They are quite nice and immediately understands my concern and begins to review
my cellular data usage.
16. She says, "you recently changed your plan."
17. I tell her I didn't change my plan.
18. It says you changed to the 5G plan.
19. Boom! I have just realized that Chatman was not compensating me with additional G's get
met hrough the remaining 2 weeks of billing. He had changed my existing plan from 3G's to
5G's for good. He had sold me a new plan without telling me.
20. I inquire how much more per month it will cost.
21. Boom! She says $10 per month.
22. I tell her I never agreed nor intented to change my plan. I was led to believe I was being
relieved of any additional data overages for the remainder of my billing cycle. I intended to
find the reason for the high data usage, that was all.
23. I asked her to change my plan back. I again explained to her, I am trying to find out why I am
suddenly using so much data while I am using the phones the same way as we always have.
24. Boom!-She tells me about the Apple ios9 upgrade and the "wifi-assist" button. This is the first
time this button is mentioned in the 1 hour I have been working with Att&t on this problem.
I don't know if it was intentional or not. She did not reply to my request to change the
data plan back.
25. The update info makes a little bit of sense, since I did do an ios9 Apple update about 2 weeks
before. Then I ask her to change my plan back and we will see if this fixes the usage issue.
26. Another Boom! She tells me my 3G plan (which I had just 45 minutes ago) is no longer
available.
Stunned...
27. I tell her very clearly. I never intended to change plans, that Chatman never told me I was
changing plans or how much the additional plan would cost. I asked for a copy of the
chat dialogue between Chatman and myself since it wasn't available to me to print out once
Chatman tranferred via phone. She told me one wasn't available.
28. She told me she will make a note in my file and that someone will decide about changing my
plan back and contact me in 4-5 business days.
29. I thanked her and told her, again very clearly. If they don't return me back to my 3G plan I will
cancel all my att&t accounts and I will tell everyone I know about my experience.
FYI: These conversations were very professional, cordial and respectful by all of us.
3 areas of concerns as they relate to my experiences.
1. Does At&t expects these customer experiences and the training is to up sell more G's as a
solution. They don't want to help you find how you waste data, they want you to buy more.
2. The training is poor and out of date. Why did it take an hour to learn of the "wifi-assist"
switch. If the Chatman had offered my this solution first. We would have been off the chat
in a minute.
3. Or a combination of all three.
The thing that has me most upset by far, and by far I mean miles farther than the data usage
overages. It is the fact, Att&t says my 3G plan is no longer available moments after switching me. This happened once before a couple of years ago. Same vague switch dressed up as a solution. Their solution had nothing to do with my data usage problem.
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