Complaint Review: AT&T - Dallas Texas

As a business executive myself, I simply cannot believe or understand AT&Ts tactics to totally disconnect themselves as a corporation from their direct relationship to their brand (their customers across the country/world).

Anyone that has ever had experience with trying to resolve any issues with AT&T has first hand experience of this unbelievable apporach by this American corporation. It is virtually impossible to get resolution on issues beyond what AT&Ts call center agents and superviors can provide, which is very limited decision making power. The company's leadership team and executives hide behind the vail of call agent screening and apparently must literally threaten their call centers with termination if anyone should ever allow a customer to acutally speak with a business leader with true athority.

For months now, AT&T has had a degraded tower in our community and the manner in which they simply ignore servicing our community is unacceptable. Our phone, text, and Internet service is unreliable and intermittent. When this problem first began we called to troubleshoot spending 45-50 minutes per call on the phone with a cadre of customer service agents and tech support staff. After going through a lengthy process it was admitted to us that a tower (or even multiple towers) in our area were indentifed as degraded and that was the root of our service problems. Not our phones. Not a user issue. AT&Ts tower(s) not delivering our service. We asked what our options were and were given - nothing. We signed up with AT&T as a wireless carrier in 2010, I believe. In December 2012 we upgraded phones and extended our contract. The service became unreliable sometime in the spring/early summer time frame. As aeveryone that has a cell phone knows, we pay for the phone to work... and if it doesn't it only seems right on the AT&T customer promise for them to resolve it, or allow a customer to end the service contract and waive the early termination fee. That's not the solution for AT&Ts call center representatives and supervisors. Each month now, aside from having cell phones that have unreliable service in a home community, we have to call AT&T and they have elected to just give us a credit on our bill. That completely defeats the point of having a cell phone. Paying less for a cell phone that doesn't work isn't an acceptable resolution. Yet, for months now, that is all AT&T call center reps will do. Ironically, now the customer reps themselves recognize just how poorly AT&T is treating us as customers and they empatheze and ask to place us on hold while they speak with a supervisor, who always gives us nothing but the option to run us through 40-55 minutes of troubleshooting to once more confirm the AT&T towers are degraded in our area. 

Today I called AT&T from my new Verizon phone. Once more I was just going to accept the rediculous response to this problem and go on to next month, knowing that after this contract I will never hav anythng related to AT&T for the rest of my life. I even explained the personal impact AT&Ts poor service had on my family explaining that our son had an emergency at school 2.5 miles from our home, but we were notified because it took 4 hours for the voice message to get to us after we left the area and were 30-minutes away.

Economically, aside from the brand damage the company will cost themselves through us, and our sphere of influence, and many other AT&T customers in our area, the monthly credit they apply toward our account is less than the amount of the early termination fees, which I refuse to pay to leave because of their technical issues. No one is even pragmatically looking at this from a financial perspective or direct cost to AT&T. The apathy of the board of directors, executive team, and leadership group to isolate themselves from customer issues is a world class embarrassment.