Contributor
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1 Message
Dissatisfied "loyal customer"
Dear AT&T U-Verse,
I am taking the time to write this letter because I believe that as a whole your company is “missing the point”. A little over 5 years ago my husband and I were approached by a door-to-door sales person advertising this new product by AT&T called U-Verse. We were one of the first people in our neighborhood to sign up. Since that time we have tolerated service disruptions, (during some of the most crucial television events- i.e. Super bowl, NCAA Championship games), internet drops, and phone outages almost on a monthly basis. Most of the time these issues are resolved by doing reboots to the system. On occasion the issue was too severe for a “general reboot”. During those times we had to call into the company and/or take time out of our day to “wait on the cable guy”. Yet we continued to pay our monthly bill, usually to the tune of more than $175.
More recently we had an outage that was reportedly a regional outage (April 7, 2014). Our service, including internet and home phone, were out for more than a day. We called and spoke with Technical support and after exhaustingly explaining that we had done the reboots (we are pro’s at rebooting by this time), the representative finally agreed to send a technician out to our home. This of course occurred during the NCAA championship game which my husband missed as a result of the outage. Needless to say, we waited at home for the technician. In the meantime we continued to attempt reboots and finally within an half an hour of the technician’s scheduled arrival, everything came back up. We called U-Verse and were told to let the technician come in any way to check and make sure “everything worked properly”. The technician came in and replaced a receiver and left.
A week later, the system crashed again. Once again we rebooted the system and the television began to work again. I went online and found an alert indicating the Residential Gateway needed to be replaced. I called and spoke with a technician and was told a replacement would be sent the next day. Sure enough the replacement arrived as promised. I did as the representative instructed and while disconnecting cords from the old gateway placed the corresponding cords into the new gateway. The new gateway however, looks nothing like the old one so I had to rely on “reading” each port and placed the cords associated with that particular port. Once that was done, the system did not come back up. However, the lights were all green on the gateway except for the service light. The broadband light was green, the power light was green, and everything else was green except for that.
Once again, this is during a crucial time for my family. My husband is taking online college classes and was in the midst of completing a paper. I called the representative and by this time I am no longer confident in U-Verse’s ability to provide me with adequate service. I counted and realize I am paying over $3000 a year to your company and am receiving less than exemplary service in return. That makes me a fool. There are obvious smaller company’s out here that are “nipping” at your company’s heels and it seems that your company has grown from the “door-to-door sales” to being a big conglomerate no longer concerned if the product you are providing is meeting the criteria you say it does.
I am not a person who makes changes often. Prior to transitioning to U-Verse I was with DirecTV for over 10 years. So I don’t easily “make changes”, but there comes a time when you are left without a choice. I believe this is that time. You have the potential to have lifetime customers but I don’t think that’s your concern. You seem to be more concerned with volume than value.
That being said, I just wanted to voice my complaint and dissatisfaction. It is unfortunate, but I suppose inevitable. What you permit is what you promote. In this case I permitted your company to time after time provide me with less than exemplary service and thus I promoted the notion that it was acceptable to provide less than adequate service.
I am a nurse and I believe that if you were in my hospital receiving care and I gave you the type of service your company has given me, it wouldn’t take long for you to let me know you were not satisfied. Well this is me saying to you, I am not satisfied.
I hope that this letter serves as a learning tool for future customers or I can assure you, you will lose more and more customers in the near future.
Thank you,
T. Turner
Constructive
Former Employee
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32.9K Messages
10 years ago
Gosh how do i say this without coming off as innapropriate? so ill just say it
As a nurse you know that not everybody that walks into your hospital leave on their own 2 feet or better than when they came in. Yet you wont hear about any of the thousands that you have helped feel better just the dis satisfied ones. Theres a saying thats used regularly No matter how many attaboys you get it only takes one to stand out. I am in no way comparing the wonderfull work you do to tv services but there are millions of satisfied customer out there to the small percentage of dissatisfied customer, it is unfortunate that you are one of those customers. But in general one only hears the negative not the positive. Also keep in mind that UVERSE is still in its infancy and AT&T is constantly working to upgrade and improve its infrastructure. If you are asking for help in resolving this issue there is a fantastic team of customer care agents that watch this forum and offer help with the issues you may be having
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ledbelly2142
Tutor
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4 Messages
10 years ago
1-not a good analogy, don't compare human life service dysfunction
2-the poor lady is spending $3K a year for internet service, console her through understanding, e.g. "I know how you must feel, I would feel the same way..."
3-the adage "10 happy customers may say something once but 1 unhappy customer complains a lot" does a disservice to the customer having a problem, e.g. It's not us, its you.
4-if Uverse is still in its infancy, dont sell it as a baked product. This is a very poor excuse for crappy service.
5-I really hope your not an AT&T employee. I would expect this from another customer, but not someone from AT&T
My $0.02.
Also, I just posted an "unhappy customer" entry in this forum as well. I would really like to hear what you have to say about my experience.
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Constructive
Former Employee
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32.9K Messages
10 years ago
2-the poor lady is spending $3K a year for internet service, console her through understanding, e.g. "I know how you must feel, I would feel the same way..."
it is unfortunate that you are one of those customers. But in general one only hears the negative not the positive. Also keep in mind that UVERSE is still in its infancy and AT&T is constantly working to upgrade and improve its infrastructure. If you are asking for help in resolving this issue there is a fantastic team of customer care agents that watch this forum and offer help with the issues you may be having no need to console her, she doesnt want to be consoled she wants it fixed and i gave her a path for a solution
3-the adage "10 happy customers may say something once but 1 unhappy customer complains a lot" does a disservice to the customer having a problem, e.g. It's not us, its you
I am a nurse and I believe that if you were in my hospital receiving care and I gave you the type of service your company has given me, it wouldn’t take long for you to let me know you were not satisfied..Same thing she said just in a different contect
4-if Uverse is still in its infancy, dont sell it as a baked product. This is a very poor excuse for crappy service.
Every product and every service is new at one time and none were perfect from the start this is not an excuse its life,its electrinics and not every issue is forseeable,the OP states We were one of the first people in our neighborhood to sign up
5-I really hope your not an AT&T employee. I would expect this from another customer, but not someone from AT&T
Expect what? for me to have no opinion? And yes im a proud at&t employee that knows the system isnt perfect and that even though you may not see results fast enough rest assured they are being taken care of as quickly as possible
If i have offended the OP in any way i will gladly appologize.
My $0.02.
Also, I just posted an "unhappy customer" entry in this forum as well. I would really like to hear what you have to say about my experience.
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ledbelly2142
Tutor
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4 Messages
10 years ago
Constructiv,
Fair enough.
-G
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Anonymous
New Member
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25.7K Messages
10 years ago
I am a customer of 7 years also. I want to say that my service has been very good. My system has only been out 2 or 3 times in the last 7 years and when I have had to call customer service has been very good and resolved my issues. Every tv service I have had has outages. My outages have been less they an hour. I am sorry you have had these problems and you have to do what is best for you but for me Uverse beats Charter in service. But again I do not die if there is an outage. I just wait till it comes back up. Thank you AT&T for providing me the best service on the market. I love the fact that you have the east and west feed of many channels and the neet interactive features that you do not get with other providers.
A very happy customer.
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ms_unicorn
Former Employee
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4.9K Messages
10 years ago
Hello, tturner10!
Thanks for posting. I'm so sorry to hear about your recent experiences with U-verse. We would certainly hate to see you go, so if there's anything we can do, please let us know by clicking here to send us a private message.
In your message, please provide your name, phone number, email address, and the best time to reach you. You can expect a reply within two business days, so keep an eye on the little blue envelope icon in the top right corner of your screen.
In the meantime, feel free to message me with any other questions or concerns.
-Mariana
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