Please be aware you are being informed of this because I used to work for the company. There are some things I agree with and alot that I don't. When it comes to taking care of the customer I am fully for making sure that the customer is satisfied before I have released a call.
Last year about this time my team was trained on a new system that Cingular (AT&T) is now putting in place called C.A.C.S. T Gold. C.A.C.S. Stands for Computer Assisted Collections System. The way that this system works is how your paymnent history is with Cingular.
If your payment history is excellent with the company meaning your balances are always paid in full and on or before the due date, your account is classified as a "Consumer Lenient" account and the billing system will allow how much time you get to pay your balance if you happen to have a period when you can't pay your balance on time.
If your payment history is moderately good, meaning you are late on occasion and every now and then your accounts gets suspended for non payment of a balance, then you are classified by the system as "Consumer Moderate", meaning you might get some time to pay your balance or you might not.
Now, if you are the one who is "always late paying your bill and your account gets suspended every month, then you will be classified as "Consumer Agressive", which means you get no time at all to make a payment and you get no extensions to pay your balances until you have gone 6 whole months with not service suspensions.
In addition to this, the system no longer gives the ability to view when the account is scheduled to suspend nor does it give the ability to move an suspension date if one is set to happen.
At the time that the system was rolled out all of South Texas and a lot of those Cingular employees that live in that region who had delinquent accounts got fired due to the fact that this system gave the company the ability to find out which employees were paying their bills or not.
The estimated time that the C.A.C.S. System to be completely in place is by the end of this new year. You will still get billed the usual $36.00 fee for reconnection of services and now they are no longer waiving that fee if it is not a Cingular (AT&T) error. Also if you threaten to cancel service because you do not agree with the fee then you will also get hit with a contract termination fee of now $175.00 per line on your account if your contract is not lived out and that does not get waived either.
Also if you take your number from the Cingular (AT&T) system and move to another carrier and you are not out of contract you get billed the contract termination fee and the company will not waive it stating that if the fee is waived they would be basically paying the customer for taking a number that originated in the Cingular (AT&T) system to another system and that is lost revenue.
In the end we learned in traing that according to the CEO of the company Cingular (AT&T) is no longer going to put up with bad debt and if the customer cannot pay their bills on time for services rendered, then they don't want to have them as customers any way, and this new billing system is the best way to make the bad paying customers leave. The finishing statement was let those bad customers be some other cell phone carrier's problem.
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