AT&T
"We made a mistake, we'll get you back online in a week"

In order for customer service and tech support to work in favor of your company, one of the key things you do not do is drive them to your closest (& only) real competitor in the area.

Today (2009.04.23) marks the day that AT&T would've come to my apartment building to fix the mistake they made in unhooking the wrong unit in the first place. On Friday of last week our internet service was cut, at about this time (~103000) after some neighbors were done moving out about a week before, their unit number differs by one digit and were our closest neighbors in the building.

Naturally I called tech support after realizing that there was basically nothing I could do to get it back, the modem/router was working fine, power was on and I could access the local area network, but the broadband link had been cut (though fortunately not my phone service) and diagnostics pulled up absolutely nothing.

After about a day of talking to tech support and being put on hold, they agreed to send someone out…

…yeah, six days of no service is what they were promising after they cut our service. It was probably just a mistake, I can only assume they got the wrong unit number because such information is naturally confidential, but if it takes them a week to give service to someone in San Francisco naturally it would probably take them a week to cut service, or I should hope.

The most annoying thing about this though, the last guy I talked to basically said the reason it took a week is "because you're in California, if you were in Texas we'd get you hooked up in a couple of hours."

Even if that's true, it's still a surefire way to get your customers to cancel, cancel we did and Comcast delivered service the next morning, and we were back online just 24 hours after losing service, and just 16 hours after canceling service with more than 4 times the bandwidth of what we were paying for with AT&T (though sadly there is that 250GB cap as well, I don't think we use more than 80GB a month though and I care not for Bittorrent either).

I still don't trust Comcast, but at least they delivered quickly.

Company: AT&T
Country: USA

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