Adventures in Customer Service, Part 2 of 3

We started discussing the epic fail of AT&T customer service over here in part 1 .

Let’s continue with our list.

YOUR WORDS SPEAK LOUDER THAN YOUR ACTIONS

I spoke to a CSR four times in five days.  At the end of each call, I was treated to this message:

“AT&T cares about you, so don’t text and drive.”

Seems harmless, huh? Good PR, anyway – AT&T can claim that they are addressing this important public safety issue and check it off as good corporate citizenship.

Text and drive all over the place,whatevs.

Well, after hearing it four times in five days, no matter what my interaction was with AT&T on each call, I was ready to start texting and driving in rebellion!

AT&T must be measuring their CSRs on delivery of this message and it’s got to be a high priority for them.  Of course, being repeatedly annoyed about texting and driving wasn't on my priority list...

This point - that AT&T's priorities were in fact more important than mine - really became clear to me on the third call.  This was the one on Friday night and I was livid that a promised appointment with a technician within a twelve hour window did not actually happen.

Remember,  I had to chase down AT&T to figure out what was going on - especially irritating as they robocalled me earlier in the day saying I would, in fact, see a technician that day, so I should stick around the house.

I spent the majority of this phone call complaining and expressing my frustration, and talking about finding a new internet provider (tersely, but as politely as I could manage, as I don’t believe in abusing customer service people).  The CSR handled the call very well up to this point, sounding sympathetic and patient.

So, after about twenty minutes of my venting my extreme displeasure, as we end the call, he just has to make sure he ends with “AT&T cares about you, don’t text and drive.”

"No Way"
WAY!

Hey, AT&T, if you actually cared about me, you would have let me know that the technician was not going to show up without my having to call you.  You would not have required me to call you on Saturday to make sure when and if a tech was going to show up to my house.

If you actually cared about me, you’d understand that harassing me about texting and driving is completely inappropriate when you are in the middle of apologizing profusely for failing to follow through on a promise and wasting an entire day of my time.

The CSR should have been able to use human judgment and say, “Let’s skip the texting and driving message on this call, because it probably sounds pretty stupid”, without fear of being harassed by his managers about not having the cover on his TPS reports (or however they measure such things over there).

But because AT&T needs to appear to care about my safety, it looks to me like they have to deliver this texting and driving message on every call, and if they don’t deliver the message, I bet there are negative consequences in store for that CSR.

AT&T, your actions show that you don’t care about me, so stop forcing your CSRs to say that you do. It’s insulting.

Ok, again, I'm out of space here, so I'll finish up in Part 3.