What Y. wanted was simple enough: to remain an AT&T U-Verse customer while moving from one apartment to another within the same complex. Somehow, this process took two and a half hours of navigating the customer service maze after someone typed the wrong apartment number on his service order. The individual customer service representatives weren’t the problem. AT&T’s system was.

AT&T has the worst customer service experience setup. Let me make clear, my own reps were good people, understanding of all the time I was on hold because they were, too. But hey, at least they were being paid to waste time on hold.

This time, I was simply trying to move my service from one apartment to another in the SAME complex. I called them, hold for thirty minutes, got somebody in the retention department who seemed helpful. Little did I know that he’d make a blunder that would eat two additional hours of my life.

I noticed a few days before my appointment the wrong apartment listed on my order. I decided to use their web chat to fix this simple problem. After fifteen minutes the rep showed up and I explained my issue. Ten minutes later, the rep told me that he could not help me and pointed me to the general AT&T customer service/sales number. Gee, thanks. I got busy the next few days and wasn’t able to invest the time spent sitting on hold to correct this. Maybe, I thought, the field service rep would call and verify, and I could explain the typo then.

It did not surprise me they were a no show the day of the appointment. The original rep *had* listed the same old apartment number as both the original and destination, obviously makes no sense on a move service order. However, they did not call, either. Curious, I called ATT customer support.

The first rep, while friendly, was generally unhelpful except for forwarding me to another customer service department. The second rep, while trying to help, could not actually help, because the ticket was submitted by the retention department. I am up to about forty minutes hold time at this point. They try to forward me to the retention department, then get back on the phone ten minutes later regrettably informing me that it was the wrong retention department and it would need to be another ten minutes.

I finally get to Uverse retention. The very nice rep here seemed genuinely concerned. While she kept me on hold longer than any single rep, I can picture the CLUSTER she had to deal with. It turned out that BOTH tickets, one to shut off my service and one to start service at the new place had been submitted incorrectly, so while they were posted and I could see them on my account page, they could not FLOW into the system. It would have made no difference that the apartments were listed incorrectly. No ticket got to dispatch. Meanwhile, AT&T was still charging my credit card. Great. I spent the next fifty minutes on hold while my rep tried to get me a better appointment date. My retention rep actually had to wait and negotiate with other parts of AT&T to get me a better appointment? WTF? They had to wait for this department that had to wait for dispatch. That is like one long ass line of people just sitting there listening to elevator music. My rep doggedly stayed on hold tryi
ng to get me a better time because I’d been without Internet at home so long. She was nearly in tears for me by the end when she told me she could call me back at my cell phone to further assist me, and inform me of my new time. I told her, don’t worry about it, just give me the best date available, which was at the end of the month. She kindly (rightly) backdated my charges to the cancellation date even though the original cancel ticket had also not gone through.

Damages, which I know compared to other ATT customers is a drop in the bucket:

Total time on the original order: 30 minutes
Total time on a useless chat session: 25 minutes.
Total time on the phone to correct things 1 hour 41 minutes (101 minutes)

TOTAL TIME TO GET MY SERVICE CHANGED 156 MINUTES

ARE YOU EFFING KIDDING ME AT&T? TWO AND A HALF HOURS TO KEEP ME AS A CUSTOMER? WTF AT&T? This is how you lose customers. If that technician does not show up in the allotted time and get my Internet set up, I am going to learn to tether and cut the cord with a 4G plan. You know what, T-mobile tells me they have the largest 4G network out there.

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