Thomas Hawk, he of a PriceRitePhoto scandal fame and G.I. Joe name (lucky bastard), details his attempt to sign up with Cingular Wireless’s 3G Laptop Connect service. He’s already an AT&T Wireless customer—now part of Cingular—but the Cingular rep insisted that he ‘switch’ to Cingular so he could use the 3G service. Thomas seems a little baffled by this, but having put in our times in the phone trenches, we can almost certainly say that the rep would have gotten a ‘sale’ on her account had she convinced Mr. Hawk to switch his service.

How would that have benefited Thomas Hawk? Probably not at all, but that was hardly Cingular’s concern. Instead, after jiggering with their offers multiple times, they lost the opportunity to add services to an existing customer. Thomas notes:

I’m constantly amazed at how wrong Cingular’s reps get things all the time. Ask three different people the same question and you get three different answers.

Here’s a little anecdote to tell you how common this is. When writing our monthly column for a print mag, we often call the customer service line in a search for correct answers to readers’ questions. Amazingly, the answers really do vary nearly every time, forcing us to contact the PR outlets of the phone companies to get correct answers.

Hey, that just gave us an idea…

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