I think today the winner must be the telegraph... because after receiving an email notification that a T1 circuit was down it stayed that way for 6 hours with just two burps of functionality. Had I been a telegraph customer instead of a T1 customer I think the service would have been much more in line with my expectations.
Most annoying is that AT&T refuses to do tech support online, though posting a traceroute or ping would be much more effective at reporting trouble than dealing with a call center. Also annoying is that AT&T in their email said that "Status will continue to be provided throughout the life of this trouble ticket."
9 hours later I have yet to receive one status report about what is going on. It's not even clear that the problem has been resolved, although the circuit appears to be working!
It also seems to be particularly wasteful of time and energy to automatically report an outage and then require the customer to spend time on the phone to report the exact same outage before anything will be done to resolve it!
Now, because I was limited in my usual work, I decided to email the Corporate PR department (mcoe@attnews.us) at AT&T to get some ideas from CEO Randall Stephenson relates to their poor service.
Comments from Randall L. Stephenson for blog post
I am a blogger for a website, called phonehell.com. You can probably
suppose what I write about! I would be interested in Mr. Stephenson's
comments on why after 6 hours the trouble reported on this ticket has
not been resolved, there is no indication of what the problem is, or
when it will be resolved?
I might also note that "Status will continue to be provided throughout
the life of this trouble ticket." is a nice thing to say in your
email, but it would be even better if it was something that actually
happened too! It's kind of like reading on your website about what
great services you actually offer... and then experiencing the
tremendous let down when actually using them!
I look forward to not only Mr. Stephenson's comments to publish with
my blog about your lack of competent technical support, but also
resolution of this issue in a timely manner.
Thanks
On Wed, Sep 23, 2009 at 10:30 AM, cbusagent@aotscbus.ims.att.com
wrote:
> This email is to inform you that a proactive trouble ticket (000000XXXXXXXXXX) has been created on IP address for:
>
> IP Address: 12.XXX.XXX.XXX - UNKNOWN
>
> Asset Address:
>
> due to a failure identified by AT&T proactive monitoring tools.
>
> If you have verified the power and equipment at the premise location for this alarm and feel you require more information, please call AT&T IP Services Customer Care at 888-613-6330.
>
> Status will continue to be provided throughout the life of this trouble ticket.
>
> AT&T IP Services Customer Care
