What Happened to Customer Service AT&T?

AT&T

On August 5, my home phone and� Inter­net died and as of today it is still out. I have been hav­ing prob­lems for nearly two months where every time it rained the Inter­net would go out. After a month long wait a tele­phone repair tech­ni­cian called and said it was “fixed.” This was the day before the cur­rent out­age. After my ser­vice had been out for sev­eral hours I bit the bul­let and began the labo­ri­ous task of open­ing a repair ticket. It took an hour and 15 min­utes before I was con­nected to a human. Two min­utes into the call I was put on hold and dis­con­nected. I called back and after 45 min­utes I was con­nected with a human again. I detailed my prob­lem and they tested my phone line. It was deter­mined that my phone was in fact out (I’m glad they con­curred). This is where the fun started. She told me that it would be repaired no later than Sep­tem­ber 1! I thought I mis­un­der­stood, I ques­tioned the date but I heard cor­rectly. Nearly a month with­out ser­vice, thats 1/12 of 2009 I would not have access to the Inter­net and home phone! She told me the crews were run­ning 3–4 weeks behind on repairs. When I con­tin­ued ques­tion­ing the date she assured me that this was a worse case esti­mate and it would most likely be repaired much sooner. I then reminded her of the her pre­vi­ous state­ment about the crews being behind and sur­mised that it would not be repaired early.

Her next state­ment trou­bled me. She told me that if I put in a busi­ness line I could have it fixed in about 48 hours. 48 hours, thats odd I thought the crews were 3–4 weeks behind. How could this be? This implied that cus­tomer ser­vice and the right to have the basic prod­uct I pay for was only avail­able at an addi­tional cost and by doing this the crews sud­denly became avail­able and could fix my problem.

Before� AT&T bought� Bell­south we had a few phone ser­vice issues and they always guar­an­teed them fixed within 24–48 hours and like clock­work they always did. I am very upset at how AT&T has treated me but I have no options. I never use the home phone but their DSL ser­vice is the only Inter­net option I have in my neigh­bor­hood. AT&T, I am ask­ing for noth­ing more than for you to stand behind the ser­vice you sell. If you are really as swamped as you imply you should dis­con­tinue sell­ing new ser­vice until you are able to sta­bi­lize you cur­rent cus­tomer base but we know that will never happen.

I will update this post as this issue progresses.

UPDATE: As of about 10 min­utes ago the ser­vice is finally restored!