The superb What Geeks experience contrasts with the dismal customer service black hole which is Cingular Wireless.
My account has fallen victim to the merger between Cingular and AT&T Wireless. I sent Cingular a payment, but continued to get dunning phone calls. It turned out that while I had changed the address from Cingular to AT&T, I had failed to update my account number to the new Cingular account. They couldn’t find my payment. So I double-paid using my credit card to keep them from turning off the account.
The next step is to fax bank and bill-pay records of the transaction to their research department. The support person had a helpful demeanor, but was unable to confirm the fax number of the research department, or any way to check on the problem once the records had been faxed in. I’m scheduled to get a call back on Wednesday.
In the meantime, Cingular has a visible amount of my money earning interest somewhere. If one has bad memories of MCI billing “glitches” that turned out to be genuine, one might start to be suspicious at this point. There’s plenty of money to be made by double-billing people who have problems with the AT&T conversion. Hanlon’s Razoroffers some mild comfort to the paranoid: “Never ascribe to malice, that which can be explained by incompetence.”
p.s. Here’s Chris Shipley of Network World and the Demo conferences telling her story about getting stuck in the AT&T/Cingular transition.
Oh how I feel your pain as I am caught in the same snafu. Luckily my contract with ATT was expired. So I can switch easily. But who do I switch to? AT&T was the only one I like and respected.
so now I suffer from inaction but my old phone has started making a jangling noise when shaken and that just can’t be good…
Cingular’s “Rope ‘Em In Then Hang ‘Em Out to Dry” Plan
Imagine if companies exerted as much effort to keep you as they did to get you. If you are ready to make a purchase between two equally qualified vendors, a quick check like this is awful telling.