We all have our stories of frustration which come from trying to get something done working with a giant organization – the government and AT&T are the among the largest. Recently I had an adventure in communication challenges and obstacles with the communication giant AT&T which I just have to “get off my chest”. My hope is that I can share some insights into the communication challenges faced as our company grows in order to avoid frustrating our great customers like AT&T frustrated me. I’m fairly confident (or at least willing to give the benefit of the doubt) that no single person that I interfaced with the past 2 months at AT&T intentionally tried to frustrate me. But I think the challenges come when “the right hand doesn’t know what the left hand is doing” which seems so often the case in giant companies. Here’s my story.
We wanted to purchase AT&T’s new UVerse service for our office. It would take us from a T1 line (1.45 Mbps) to an 18 Mbps line, and would cost a fraction the cost of the T1 line. It seemed like one of those “too good to be true” things, but knowing the direction of communication technologies costs over the past 30 years was not too unbelievable. So I had our network administrator begin the process of ordering this new service. After about a month of him getting the run around, first being told we couldn’t get it then being told no problem, then being totally ignored as he got passed off from one sales rep to the next, I decided it was time for the “boss man to get involved”. Nothing against youth, but some business problems are best solved by someone with all the bumps and bruises of exerience.
Rather than bore you with the day to day details of my journey, I’ve decided to simply outline the hightlights. Here we go.
- discovered why Jared was getting the run around; our main phone line is an AT&T line, one of the requirements for UVerse, but we pay for it through a third party so AT&T’s system refused to process our order request; of course it would have been nice if the human being on the other end of the phone would have told us this, but then I’d have nothing to be blogging about
- no problem I thought, I’ll just order a new phone line directly from AT&T; so I did, and after a few bumps and bruises it was installed; hurdle #1 cleared!
- now I place an order for UVerse to be provisioned on this new line; they take the order; nothing happens; after making a few calls, one of which I was actually transferred 5 times, I hung up in total frustration! among other things I was being told the same thing Jared had been told at one point, oh, UVerse is not available at your location!
- there is an old saying “its not what you know but who you know that counts”, so I decided to call a friend of mine, David Baxtor, who works here in Greenville for AT&T; David and I are members at Hampton Park Baptist Church were we happily serve the Lord together; David is very knowledgeable of AT&T and likes to see customers’ needs being met
- David makes some calls and finally gets someone to call me back; we are back on track; UVerse is available and can be installed; but over the course of the next 2 weeks, nothing happens, other than phone calls, voice mall, being moved from person to person within AT&T (honestly, I think I ended up speaking to at least 20 different employees over the 2 months)
- I finally got a very knowledgeable account rep from Columbia who called me, at David’s urging, and we started upraveling the problem(s)
- I felt in very competient hands when she transferred me to a UVerse salesperson and said “now here is Mr Wooster’s phone number in case the call is disconnected”; I did most of this process over my AT&T iPhone and have to admit that my call was dropped at least 2 or 3 times; well sure enough, about 3 minutes into the call, we got disconnected; interesting to note that I still had 5 full bars at the time! I waited patiently for 10 minutes, a very very difficult thing for me, and no call back. Finally I called Nickie back in Columbia, she was appauled that the UVerse person didn’t call me back
- Once Nickie found out all I wanted use the Internet portion of UVerse (not TV), she said “Oh, I can place that order for you” so she did. I should note here that later that evening, about 10PM, I got a phone call from the UVerse salesrep I can been disconnected from. She said here lines was ringing all day long and this was the first break she had in which to call me back! I would not want her job.
- I asked Nickie, which phone line are you placing this order for? She gave me the number of our main line, the one which we learned AT&T will not put UVerse on. So I gave her the correct number. Then I asked “and to what address will you deliver this service?” She paused and said “that’s weird, the computer shows your address as 303″. I said “303 what?” Just 303 she said. So I gave her the correct address, otherwise we would have gone round and round another 2 weeks wondering why no one showed up to intall!
- I’m happy to report that I spoke with Jason, an AT&T Uverse technician who just arrived at the right address to install our UVerse service!!!
Lessons
- communication is the key to all successful relationships
- the bigger the vendor, the more time you will have to spend managing that relationship
- making assumptions (like which phone number and which address) is usually where the problems creep in
- persistence is priceless is you want to get AT&T UVerse run to your business!
I hope Worthwhile will always be sensitive to our customer relationships and will do all we can to avoid making it difficult for folks to do business with us! As our company continues to grow, as we have been the past 6 years, I think once we hit about 50 employees, it will be time to start another company!!