For Faster Service, Wait Until Wednesday?

Hav­ing AT&T Yahoo DSL is one of the great­est cures ever for writer’s block. Their laugh­able cus­tomer ser­vice reg­u­larly pro­vides me with mate­r­ial for this blog and hence I offer the lat­est chap­ter of the ongo­ing story pro­vided by AT&T Yahoo DSL.

This chap­ter began in May with my reluc­tant renewal of ser­vice. I decided that the switch­ing costs were too high, espe­cially when I would be switch­ing to Time Warner, per­haps even worse than AT&T. So I made the call to renew, believ­ing that I had actu­ally bet­tered my sit­u­a­tion. After all I man­aged to lower my monthly bill by two dol­lars and received a faster con­nec­tion– a pretty sweet deal, so I thought. Well yes­ter­day the lat­est bill arrived, and I was charged over dou­ble what I was sup­posed to have been. “Here we go again,” I thought. So I scanned the bill try­ing to deci­pher exactly what had tran­spired. There were a series of charges and cred­its, none of which seemed to make any sense. Alas I knew I was going to have to make “THE CALL.” If you have AT&T you know how painful that call can be. So I grabbed my bill, put on a smile, dialed the num­ber, and hoped for the best.

After nav­i­gat­ing the auto­mated ques­tions, I was informed that my wait would be longer than ten min­utes. I wanted to get this resolved, so I decided it would be worth it to stick it out and wait. As I patiently waited, I decided to review the rest of my bill. I soon came to a page enti­tled “News You Can Use.” This page is full of infor­ma­tion and con­tains a sec­tion titled BEST TIMES TO CALL which pretty much sums up AT&T’s phi­los­o­phy on cus­tomer ser­vice. It also served as the inspi­ra­tion for this rant. Please allow me to share with you more about the BEST TIMES TO CALL.

So what you are say­ing, AT&T, is you real­ize that your ser­vice is poor on Mon­day and Tues­day, but it is eas­ier (for you) to have me wait until Wednes­day to call with my prob­lem. After all my lit­tle prob­lem is prob­a­bly not worth hir­ing addi­tional staff to han­dle the increased call vol­umes on Mon­day and Tues­day is it. Thanks for advis­ing me to wait. You truly do have my best inter­ests at heart don’t you. It is bad enough that they real­ize they are not equipped to han­dle this prob­lem, but it is worse to tell me to wait two days because they are not will­ing to fix it. So if you have a prob­lem on Mon­day, it is quicker to wait until Wednes­day? No what it should say it that it costs AT&T less to have you wait until Wednesday.

Need­less to say, I was con­nected after about 20 min­utes. A wait which I will­ingly accepted. I was told by the cus­tomer ser­vice rep­re­sen­ta­tive that AT&T was doing me a favor by billing me dou­ble. It turns out that they now want to bill me a month in advance for my service.

“But this was not dis­closed to me up front.” “How can you just change my billing with­out my con­sent?” I stu­pidly asked.
I was informed that I was not the first one to have this prob­lem, and they are very sorry for the incon­ve­nience (uni­ver­sal cus­tomer ser­vice cop out), unfor­tu­nately there was noth­ing that could be done.

Huh? If I am not the first per­son to have this prob­lem, why has it not been addressed? How about credit me back the stu­pid 17 bucks and enjoy my busi­ness (DSL and phone) for another year? Can you do that?

Nope, would you like me to have a man­ager call you about this sir?

“Yes Please do that,” I said obvi­ously frustrated.

I am still wait­ing for that call… When I receive it you can be sure that it will be chron­i­cled right here, and if made good I will give them credit. Unfor­tu­nately I am going to be very busy, so you might have to wait until next Wednes­day (assum­ing they call) to hear about it.