Does AT&T Hate You Too?

So why is it that companies hate their customers so much, and how do they get away with it?

A few months back, I decided to cancel my AT&T landline, and port my home number to google voice.  I read up on the easiest way to accomplish this and followed a simple recipe:

1. Get a pre-paid cell phone (from AT&T store)
2. Cancel the landline and initiate porting process to new (temporary) pre-paid cell phone
3. Once porting was complete, setup google voice, and initiate porting of phone number from pre-paid cell to google

Crazy simple right?  Well, read on my friend.

AT&T had both my landline account and my new pre-paid cell phone account. I assumed  (WRONGLY) that it would be trivial for them to port the number. So I called them. On the phone. Their landline. I was put on hold by a very pleasant voice who told me that, “AT&T values me very much as a customer, and will be with me shortly”.  They reminded me of that every 20 seconds or so for the next hour.

When I finally did speak to a representative, I explained what I wanted to do. The representative informed me that AT&T was unable to process this request over the phone. I had to go back to the AT&T store (where I got the pre-paid phone) and have that clerk enter the data into the database so that the porting could be processed.  I asked (somewhat ironically) why AT&T couldn’t just teleconference the store in question onto our call so we could proceed.  They were after all, you know, the phone company.  No dice.

I visited the store (second time) and asked them to please initiate the porting process.

After about three weeks, AT&T did get my phone number ported to my new (temporary) cell phone.

So I called AT&T back, and asked them to please port the number from my cell phone to my new google voice account.   This time I got no run-around at all. They agreed to do so immediately, and we hung up.  That process took another week or so, but at long last, my home phone landline service was cancelled, and my original home phone number was now ported to google voice.  Yeah!

Then I got a bill. Two actually.  One for the landline that I had cancelled (and ported) more than a month ago. I got a second bill for services on the pre-paid phone account that had somehow been erroneously attached to my regulars AT&T bill. So I called them, again.  And I was promptly reminded how much they valued me as a customer again.  Like before, they reminded me of this for a good hour before I got to talk to someone about the bogus charge.

That representative transferred me to another, and another, and yet another.  Five in all, and each time, I had to explain what had gone wrong.  The fifth representative was about to hand me off again (remember, this is all just to fix an error in their billing system) when I refused.  ”Look”, I said, “I’ve followed your advice throughout this whole process. I have evidence of everything I’ve asked you to do and when I asked you to do it.”  ”At this point, you’re making me spend my time helping you fix your own accounting problem, and I’m done. You’re on you’re own”.

A month later, I got  second bill from AT&T, which erased the original charges, and provided evidence that they had at long last, closed the account.

I understand that AT&T is a massive conglomerate with thousands of employees, vast computer networks with a myriad of interlocking (or not so) software systems.  Good for them.  What they don’t have, is the will to give employees the ability to solve obvious problems.  They don’t have the passion to make it their problem to see that  I don’t have a problem.  Maybe if they did all that, I’d believe that they really cared about me as a customer.  Maybe I would choose to keep them as a service provider.

In the meantime, I can’t wait until my contract is up so I can leave AT&T cellular service too.  But that’s another story.