For Great Service, Talk to Tish: AT&T Part II

Well loyal read­ers, I promised to pro­vide an update to the grip­ping saga that is my Inter­net bill as soon as any­thing changed. Hap­pily, last Fri­day some­thing did.

At the time of my last post, I was dumb­founded by the lack of pro­fes­sion­al­ism demon­strated by AT&T / Yahoo due to their inabil­ity to resolve a $17.00 dis­crep­ancy with my bill. I was made to feel like a bur­den by the cus­tomer ser­vice rep­re­sen­ta­tive, told that it was actu­ally in my favor to be dou­ble billed, and then told that there were no man­agers, none, work­ing at the time of my call. Since I had exhausted all options pro­vided me by the cus­tomer ser­vice rep­re­sen­ta­tive, I asked if a man­ager could call me later that evening. I was assured that “Yes, absolutely!” a man­ager would call later that night. (Appar­ently there were man­agers present, but they were too busy to speak with me.)

So I waited…

and waited…

and waited…

Finally on Fri­day, I decided that the call was not com­ing, so I reluc­tantly picked up the phone and dialed the cus­tomer ser­vice num­ber. I was pre­pared with pen in hand to doc­u­ment yet another deba­cle in cus­tomer ser­vice, but alas my plans were foiled by Tish.

I am not sure how Tish came to be hired by AT&T, but they damn well need to give her a raise, a pro­mo­tion, and a com­pany car. She was won­der­ful to deal with and actu­ally fixed my prob­lem. It turns out that the dis­crep­ancy was likely due to a change of address. I main­tained that we were fully paid with AT&T, while Tish explained that the records for my cur­rent phone num­ber show us as being billed one month in arrears. Tish explained her side. I explained mine. Tish lis­tened care­fully to the sit­u­a­tion, and then said that rather than waste valu­able time over $17.00, she was going to issue me a credit on the spot. She stated that she was not admit­ting that AT&T had made a mis­take, but rather that the cus­tomer rela­tion­ship was worth more than 17 dol­lars and a lot of frus­tra­tion. She han­dled it like a pro­fes­sional, and thanked me for my busi­ness. (The cus­tomer ser­vice rep­re­sen­ta­tive I spoke with on my prior call had lied to me about this too, as she had emphat­i­cally stated that such a pro­ce­dure was impos­si­ble for her to do.)

I went on to tell Tish how appre­cia­tive I was of the job she did. She truly was remark­able. If you work for AT&T and know Tish, fol­low her around with a video cam­era, a tape recorder and a note pad. She knows what she is doing, and she has the abil­ity to get peo­ple like me to say nice things about you to the world. Thank you Tish.

This con­cludes the lat­est chap­ter in the ongo­ing saga of my ISP.

voice » For Faster Ser­vice, Wait Until Wednesday?