AT&T U-Verse demonstrated great customer service when Trey needed a new receiver. They zipped a wireless one right out to him using UPS Next Day Air. It arrived on a Saturday. and Trey was quite impressed. He didn’t stay impressed, though. AT&T went to the expense of using Next Day Air while neglecting to notice that doing so was kind of useless, because AT&T wouldn’t be able to activate the new receiver until 8 P.M. on Tuesday. Oh, well, at least it was all installed three days early.

Trey writes:

We called ATT on Friday afternoon 11/9 to trade one of our Uverse receivers (which had stopped working) for the newer wireless model. They said it would be a free exchange and we would get it by Tuesday 11/13. The very next day, Saturday 11/10, to our amazement, the receiver arrived in a box labeled “Next Day” and “Saturday Delivery”. We were thrilled at such great service and to have a second working TV for a long football weekend. At long last ATT had done something outstanding.

The box.

It only took 2 minutes to install the device. But then we got an error message- call customer service about provisioning. Then after three calls that totaled at least an hour on the phone, we were finally told that there was no way they could “provision” our service before Tuesday 11/13 at 8 p.m.

The relevant note on the packing slip.

So ATT got a physical receiver box to us in less than 24 hours on a weekend but they are incapable of throwing a few software switches somewhere to actually make it usable at any time close to when it was received. And I doubt our bill will reflect a credit for the 4 days or so of service we will miss and I don’t want to navigate their phone tree again to even ask.

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