AT&T ‘Authorized Retailers’

I have worked for multiple agents and corporate owned locations. My skills revolve around customer service and providing a great in store experience. Most of the points you make go both ways. You can get a mediocre experience from both types of dealers. A good indirect agent can handle any problem or situation that originated at a corporate location and same goes for a corporate representative if they want to help. So to your point, when the corporate representative refused to help you because you purchased your device at an agent location it was because he or she didn't want to help because you did not purchase from them. Not because they couldn't help. That is just not true. The only situation in which this does not apply is when it involves crossing inventory. Agent locations and corporate locations do not share inventory and therefore you cannot do things like return inventory that you have purchased from a different type of location and so on.

Both agent and corporate representatives go through the same training that originates from AT&T Corp. Neither types of locations are trained to be technical support  however. The brick and mortar locations you see around town, wether they are corporate or agent owned, are sales locations and are both trained to offer solutions in the form of new products. Your best form of technical support is often google to be honest or if it is truly a network issue there is a technical support team accessible by phone or internet. Store employees are tech savvy but again, not trained for it.

When it comes down to it the experience you get at a store is really up in the air. I have customers that refer all their friends to me specifically and will wait in line for my help if necessary because I take pride in my work and I happened to be trained originally by an agent location and currently work for one still. Dont judge a book by its cover.

The authorized retailer I purchased from set our whole family account up as a business account to “most likely meet their quota” as the corporate store rep said. This caused 7 months of issues, hours of driving back and forth to the corporate store, and lots of money spent in gas and time off of work to fix the authorized retailer mistake. Plus, I got a call over a year later saying that collections had received a $350 unpaid monthly bill that needed to be paid. Thinking it was a scam call I called ATT support and found out it was true even after all the customer service reps said everything with that business account was taken care of. So much for crap authorized retailers. I will NEVER go to one again and also tell every person I know to only ever go to corporate stores. Google it first before you go to a random store labeled AT&T and make sure it’s a corporate store.

Well, good to know but a little to late. I was totally screwed over by one of these att authorized dealers. 

I am an authorized retailer, and I have been one for AT&T since 2005, and I'd like to reiterate the point made earlier, AT&T and Authorized Retailers are so closely associated, if not part of the same mission, and I personally strive to deliver the best possible standards based solely on the standards that I've been taught through att for 14 years now. I've turned down corporate roles, because I feel authorized retailers are the bread and butter of sales. 

We are all part of the same system, and if you feel there's a difference between authorized retailers and corporate I would argue differently. Yes, you will pay for sim cards, but that's pretty much the main difference. 

If you're really upset about paying 5 dollars, you've got other issues. 

People assume the issues they have are always someone else's fault, it's a common psychological discrepancy in deluded thinking versus proper manifestations of the communications industry. 

Therefore, do not discriminate stores because of who is the owner of the organization, because that's extremely naive to judge an entire organization through the means of leadership structural hierarchy. 

Source

AT&T Associated Partner

(Customer / Employee)

(2000- Present)

Most authorized resellers are a joke period.  They cause lots of problems because of sales tactics employees use since they are so commission based.  

Just a FYI everyone pays 5 bucks for a sim card.  I know of one reseller charging 25 a sim card.

I found the same thing, and posted a warning also to please be aware and avoid Authorized Retailers. They are NOT backed up by AT&T company, and if you experience a problem with a phone or promotion or billing, you have to fight tooth and nail to try to get help. I went through a nightmare.

That’s a bunch of bull(Edited per community guidelines) @CommunityID123 duh you couldn’t return your phone back to a corporate store the authorized retailer stores buy there own phone inventory from the supplier. Just like corporate stores but because of this you can’t swap out inventory because a corporate store would just take their stock and they would take a loss of whatever the phone cost is. Retailers normally have much better customer service because repeat business is their only income. Corporate stores whether great or horrible pay the employees the same salary. Your just a number to them. Also all retailers get the same phone training for trouble shooting as corporate stores. That training is done by the phone vender not att. And if you can read the big White Authorized Retailer letters under the sign your just a dip(Edited per community guidelines).

your whole response in short is a bad experience at a corporate store. What this equal’s to is an lazy employee and fyi couporate or no store is trained to fix phones it is not there job do you bring your car to be worked on by the person who sold it to you no.

This is inaccurate and hurtful to the mass majority who literally help people everyday and all day long abstain telecom services. You are obviously only looking at yourself and not taking account of anyone else’s experience with att especially those that have been with att for 16 years. How exactly are you going to use your one time personal experience as a defined for the future for everyone else. Good thing this was 2014. Because of it was true for EVERYONE  it would have been widely addressed but superiors other than some small complain from a blog.