After 4 long years of having the same account and transferring it from location to location every time I moved (mind you I've moved a lot in the past 4 years) and having an issue with AT&T every time I moved because someway somehow they could never check that the dates they were given for connection were not correct, or that there was no line going to the property I was moving to, or they decided to have the wrong address put in so I would end up having to wait for days to get my services while spending countless hours on the phone with 20 different idiots all of which would give me a different story and then finally having to after getting so damn frustrated with them talk to their cancelations department because guess what no matter which company you do business with, it seems like unless you end up in their cancelation or retention dept you never get any help. Which brings me to another thought...
Why in the world have all these other departments if in the end the ones that will do all the job will be the retention dept? From a business perspective it seems like it saves them money to have 1 out of 10 calls be able to be handled by the monkeys you have to talk to first that work in the regular customer service side of the business, they earn less and therefore getting them on the line with you, the consumer, cost them less.
Now don't get me wrong, I have been a customer service rep myself for 10 years and while I will admit the customer is not always right, I will also admit that one of the biggest challenges of my job has always been that I've had to deal with the mess my fellow co-workers created for a customer that would cause the customer to see me as much of an idiot as they were and really I never blamed them because seriously I would have done the same, so for those reps that actually have the brains to do things right, I'm sorry but you are gonna be put in the same group as all your fellow peers because there is just more idiots working with you than competent people and I truly feel bad for you because the ones that do a competent work actually should be better rewarded than the idiots that cause customers like me to insult you all.
It is a shame though, a company that has had such a reliable service but whose customer service level just keeps going down every time I call them, so much so that in the past 2 years there has been a brand new trend that has been happening, the social media trend, customers now go online and bash the companies they do business with because they are unable to get a positive result when they call the company directly, so AT&T has decided to have a social media customer service department which used to work wonders, they could get things done quickly but it is my believe due to recent events and recent contacts with them that the social media dept is getting bombarded with issues that their idiot customer service reps can't handle because they are too stupid which in turn has made the level of quality service of their social media dept has gone down rather than keep it at a level where more customers are satisfied with it.
What does all this mean? It basically means that AT&T is losing money, before you had the customer service side, tech support side and retention side, now you have to add more people to solve simple issues which costs more money which at some point gets pass along in the customer's bill.
Today AT&T made me even more aware of this, the company could really care less about their customers (I should say their employees could care less about the customers, I guess they forget they are customers too) I spoke with a supervisor today, her name: Jaquita Chappell (or so she said that was her name), in the past four years my bill has always been paid in full and even years before that when I had to cancel my account completely because I either moved somewhere they did not have service at or was going to be out of town where I did not need their home phone or internet service, I've always paid my account, never asked for any credits from them, even when the services were interrupted and not connected because they were idiots and did not check the addresses right, never asked for anything... Today all I asked for was for them to reage my account, in the past two months things have been hard and today the account was disconnected, my fault and I admit full responsibility for it, but because it was the first time this has happened I figured hey, I've been with this company long enough, they are always asking for my loyalty even when they don't deserve it and I've kept being loyal to them even though every time I call they make me question why I'm still paying them over 300 dollars a month between all of my accounts (cell phone, home phone and internet) when I could certainly just take my business elsewhere and do what most people do: switch from one company to the next in order to pay 19.99 a month for internet and 10 dollars for phone service, it is easy and a hell of a lot less expensive on my part (now I feel like a total idiot) but I said today I need help so I will ask the company that I've been loyal to for the past 4 years to help me this one time and see if they really appreciate the loyalty or not...
It appears that they do not, see even though they are able to reage an account and they are able to set payment arrangements for at least 30 days, they refused, why? Just because they could refuse, then after speaking with them and the first supervisor told me that they would go ahead and reage the account but that they couldn't do a payment arrangement for the time I was requesting even though they actually can do that but it is up to the supervisor to do it, once I said I was going to speak to the office of the president and complain about this, said supervisor wrote notes stating that there was to not do a reage on the account ever and that this was told to me... I seriously wish I would have recorded the call, they have the power to type on the notes anything they want and no one will question it... From then on it was 3 hours of hell... Of course once I got to the cancelation department it was not 1 but 3 reps that I spoke with who confirmed that they could do the reage but it was a matter of them wanting to do so, apparently four years of asking absolutely nothing from this company is pointless, never did I ask for credits to my account, never did I ask for reconnection fees to be credited back, it was my mistake but I just needed help at that moment since I work from home and needed my internet back on.
I then decided to go and do the social media thing and got a response a couple of hours later, I keep track of who tweets to AT&T and the issues they have and yeah I realize those poor social media reps have more than they can handle when it comes to customer service issues, some of which could actually have been fixed by my 5-year-old but because their customer service department seems to hire people with no brains and that have absolutely no care for the actual customer, someone else with a higher authority ends up being grabbed and dragged into the whole situation ousting the company a hell of a lot more money.... Then eventually it ends up being escalated to the office of the president, which last time I spoke to them for a technical issue (which their tech support dept is another one that leaves much disappointment) it took them 3 days to contact me vs the 24 hours that it usually takes, that just tells me how many issues they are having to handle and I'm sure most of them could have been avoided if they had competent people working in their customer service dept.
It is a shame that a company so big as AT&T that knows the cost of getting a new customer vs the cost of keeping one they already have, one that rarely calls (which btw every time you call any of the companies you do business with it costs them more than it costs you) has employees who have no idea on how the business runs, it is a shame that a company so big would much rather employ 30 different idiots and pay them for a job they don't do, that they won't empower their employees and teach them to research the accounts and figure out the best ways to negotiate and help the customer and lose money in the process instead of actually taking more time to hire people that will actually get the job done and pay them accordingly. It is a shame that a customer would notice how a company so big could be making more money and keep their customers around longer but that the company does not see it and makes absolutely no effort to change it's ways for the better.
How sad is it that all these companies thrive to try and get as loyal of a customers as they can get, that they ask for loyalty from us the consumer but that give no loyalty in return. How sad is it that even after everything is paid to them they still take over 24 hours to reactivate your service because hey! It's easy to click and deactivate it but we won't go ahead and activate services again that quickly for you, it's better for you to learn a lesson and really you are not worth out efforts. And this is just one example, I have a friend of mine who after being with AT&T for 13 years decided to switch over to a different internet and phone provider because AT&T decided to screw up her account and when they asked for help they receive none, took them 4 days to figure out what was wrong and it was something so simple as to just check what kind of account they had and what kind of account they actually needed...
I'm sure that just like my friend and I, we are not the only ones that have ever felt like this from one of these big companies, worst part of it is that I know nothing will actually be done to change any of it, worst part of it is that even when I do switch to a different provider they won't really care, all they will offer is more credits even though we are not asking for any, and the customer service that we actually deserve and want to get will never really be there, in fact it will continue to keep getting worse.
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