AT&T = Another Totally and Terminally Messed up Order
In a recent fiasco where we moved a client from Telepacific, who isn't that great either, to AT&T who offered fiber at a reasonable price, we discovered that the support infrastructure at AT&T is horrible. First off, there's huge language barrier. The people who work behind the sales force don't speak English very well and can confuse even the most simple requests. For example, they magically determined the hunt order for the phone roll over without disclosing it, so it took over three weeks to fix that. One of the issues is that one team would has for ports and the other team would ask for phone numbers, so we provided them with the hunt order, listing both the port and the number in the order they were supposed to roll over. It's not a very difficult request, but after a week, their supervisor over the people who can't speak English very well, send an email asking if the hunt was from the port to the number or was it from the number to the port. I have no more hair left on my head. I'm wondering how long they took trying to figure out how to build that rocket ship.
During all this time, only one line would work and there was no hunt order, thus for three weeks we could only handle one call at a time, for everyone else, the phone would ring to a rapid busy signal. This is a classic barrel full of monkey's scenario.
Finally, the hunt group was worked out, but we had to climb the change of supervisors and even then, escalated to tier 2, the first email received after being escalated was, it will take 5 days to fix the hunt group of 6 phone numbers. We placed an order for an analog line, which our sales rep claimed that we could submit through our customer portal. When we logged in with him on the phone, he couldn’t figure out how to do it. What he thought we could do for ourselves managed to delay that order for weeks also. The really sad thing is support always starts with the Sales rep. It’s one guy. How is one guy who works a standard shift suppose to handle technical issues? We call him and have to leave a message and then, in our case, wait for days to get a reply and then when we get the reply, we find that all along he thought we could fix it ourselves. He was wrong.
Now we have a problem with our 800 numbers. Before the order went in, they had the info. We repeatedly asked for a status and found that after the regular numbers had been transferred, the 800 numbers still hadn’t been addressed, no order was put in to move the numbers or to add the numbers and the 800 service to our account. We were now in jeopardy of losing the numbers and we were raising hell about it. Finally, we got an order that showed that the numbers were being moved, the number of hours we’d have included for those 800 numbers service, etc. We felt safe. Guess what? One week into the AT&T service, for which we already have a bill, we now have no 800 service.
I found out after transferring to the AT&T service from another IT professional that AT&T is the worst. If I had only known before we started down this path… if only.
