ATT messing up our account constantly.

This is a bit long, but well worth the read.

We have a Go Phone.  It is like AT&T treats us as a 2nd class, or even a 4th class citizen. 

In fact, I would not be surprised if one of the replies I get to this post is that the forums are for "real" wireless customers and not for the loathsome GoPhone customers.

We are a non profit organization in Hawaii. Being In Hawaii itself creates a problem because of the time zone difference and the ability to easily get to a HUMAN on the phone in customer service.

We had a regular (post pay) wireless account for like 9 years. About 3 years ago our phone died, and we had to buy a new phone. I found a phone that I like, but it was a "Go Phone", so, who cares ? Hey, look at that ! The GoPhone plans are 1/2 the cost ! So we switched over to a GoPhone (pre pay) account because it was 1/2 of the price of a regular account, and with all of the same features. Yes, half the monthly cost for the same features we had.

The very FIRST question I asked before switching was "what penalties are there for switching account types ?"

The sales rep, with her manager standing right beside her said "There are no penalties."  And I confirmed.  None at all ? Everything stays the same ?

"Yes. Everything stays the same" the sales rep stated.

Well, that was total GARBAGE and a Lie.

We have had nothing but problems with this GoPhone account, literally from about 3 hours after the conversion, stretching now for the full 3+ or so years. I will list some in details below, but start with the most recent.

TODAY'S PROBLEM :

Today's latest problem, is what is prompting me to create an account here online and post it for the world to see.  I am SICK AND TIRED of constantly having to play janitor and CLEAN UP YOUR MESS - AT&T.

Pretty much every time I have had to call in, a "Customer Service (CS)" rep screws up our account and I have to spend like 45 minutes or more on the phone to try to get it fixed some time later.

I called in about a month ago to try to reload cash on the account. The CS rep could not accomplish this task (more info below.) "Sir, I am very sorry to report but I appear to be having difficulties with this request." Instead of solving our problem, he created an even larger one. He switched out account billing method from the $60 a month plan to a $2 a day plan, even though I instructed him NOT TO MAKE THE CHANGE. He changed the account anyway, but on the phone said he did not and then I hung up. A few hours later I discover the change.

With this change, you loose all data & internet capabilities.

Then I called back, spoke to another rep and he assured me he was going to fix it. Instead of putting it back to the original account, he switched it to an even different account billing type. A $65 a month billing plan that has unlimited data. Again, I could not tell this immediately. I hung up, and then the next day discover the problem with the account.

With the $65 a month account, your mobile hot spot fails to work. AT&T disables the hot spot feature for this account type. I discover this DESIGN FLAW on March 24th while we are at an event and set up at a conference, and try to turn on the hot spot so we can do demonstrations for clients. "Hey, how are you going to demo your services when you can't even get your phone to work properly ?" Make us look like id1ots.

(ps. AT&T's Hyper sensitive "feelings" were bruised : "You used a bad word, id1ots, in the body of your post. Please clean up the body before posting.")

So I call in a 3rd time, March 24th now at the event with the clock ticking, I tell the CS rep, "I do not care what you have to do to fix it, FIX it, and fix it NOW"

"But sir, I am sorry to inform you however, that account type of $60 a month is no longer offered by AT&T"

WHAT ???? BULL.. FIX IT. You made the change, I did NOT want the change, YOUR rep messed it up, YOU guys FIX IT. I do not care if you have to talk to your Boss' Boss's, Boss. Fix It.

Blew another 45 minutes of time on the phone waiting, he finally was able to put it back to the $60 a month plan with the hot Spot working. Finally, but blew off a bunch of potential clients because AT&T cant get their act together.

That was a month ago.

Yesterday, I get a text message that our account will renew tonight. So, after all of the meetings and such all day, I find myself back at my office at 8 PM, finishing up for the day. Oh yes, have to pay the phone bill. So I log into the website to "refill" the account, and the add funds button will just not work. No way to type in the dollar amount and click "pay"

I messed with this for like 30 minutes, restarted the browser, maybe something in the browser was messed up. Logged out, cleared cache, restarted the computer. Nothing I did would make the buttons on the website work. OK, we have another day yet. It is now close to 9 pm, I am tired, maybe I am doing something silly tired wrong, I will do it tomorrow.

Same thing today, meetings all day and at clients sites fixing problems. 10 PM tonight I am back at the office and DING, alert goes off. OMG, got to pay the phone. SAME problem, log into the website and the button simply does not work. This is STUPID. There are no alerts on the site, no messages at to there being a problem, nothing. The website simply does not work. OK, I will call 611 on the phone and reload the account on the phone.

SURPRISE ! The account type has "expired" ---> on April 27th (tomorrow) and we can not use the account. It is now 10 pm here in Hawaii and the account expires at midnight. No way to get a REAL HUMAN on the phone with their automated system, it says the offices are closed.  Here is a link to a recording of their automated system stating the conflicting information, that : "you can not renew the $60 account because it has expired (on a future date), To renew the $60 monthly plan say refill.  You can not renew the $60 account because it has expired "

So, here I am now with no way to get the phone to work tonight once it expires, until the morning when I can try to get past the automated system to a REAL HUMAN and see if they can fix the problem. In the mean time if we have some type of customer emergency, they will not be able to call our phone and get in touch with us, and could cause us to violate some of our SLA's (Service Level Agreements)

I am SOOOO Furious right now, I cant even begin to tell you. Mad enough, that yes, I invested over an hour of time to create an account on the forums and type up this Post. I want everyone to see the continuous stupidity that we have to endure.

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PAST ISSUES :

Now, here are some of the past issues :

Day 1 of the new "No Penalty" account. (3+ years ago)

Problems started about 3 hours after we converted over to the new... "no penalty" account, I got back to my office with the new phone. Our old phone died, and was not a smart phone, there was no way to backup the data directly from the phone. That is OK, the AT&T online account has a listing of all of the phone numbers we called, and all of the text messages sent. I know, because I looked it up AT THE STORE with the sales rep and her manager before I bought the new phone. I determined I could save the online data from each monthly bill in a spreadsheet and then convert it to CSV and then import it to the new phone. In essence, I will still have all of our contact info from all of our account detail.

Nope. The first "Penalty" of our new "no penalty" account type, is that it is a NEW account completely. In setting up the GoPhone, the sales rep killed off the old regular account. There was no way to log into the old account data we had for 9 years and retrieve even the online bills or any information about the account. All of the account data, phone numbers, billing, contact info and text's that I had verified existed just 3 hours prior, was wiped out. What a profoundly STUPID design, AT&T. You just wiped out all of our important information and billing history.

The next day I went back into the store where this happened, and they said there was nothing thy could do about it. "That is how the system works."

So I reminded them of the conversation and the very FIRST question I asked was ???? ""what penalties are there for switching account types ?"

And YOU said, with your manager standing right beside you "There are no penalties."  Everything stays the same ? "Yes. Everything stays the same"

Do you remember that conversation yesterday ?

"OH, well that is not the same thing"

Right, genius. That is a "CHANGE" If you had informed me of that CHANGE before you terminated our old account, I would have FIRST retrieved all of the data that we DESPERATELY needed. But you FAILED to understand the question when I asked " Everything stays the same ?" and you even answered that "YES.. it STAYS the SAME"

Next Issue :

One Month after getting the new "no penalty" account. : Impossible to pay the bill

Did you know there is NO WAY for AT&T to use a company checking account to pay the bill for a GoPhone ? Nope, not possible. We have been trying for 3+ years and have had no less than 8 CS reps spend hours to try to run it through, unsuccessfully. Funny, because on the regular old account we had for 9 years, we used our company checking account all of the time to pay the bill. This would be another one of those "no change, changes" that is "oh that's different"

Exactly one month after we got the phone, it got shut off because there was no way for us to actually make a payment.

As stated earlier, we are a Non Profit Organization. When you try to pay a GoPhone using a BUSINESS checking account, the system asks you to put in your Birth Date and Last 4 digits of your social security number. Business and corporate checking accounts do not have "birth dates" and, businesses use an EIN number, not a social Security number. No matter how you try to plug in this info, it rejects the payment. At least that is our experience over now the past 3+ years.

So, use a credit card you say ? Well, that would be nice. But, we wanted to make sure that our funds were secure, and no one would ever be able to embezzle money from us, so, when we first opened up a bank account years ago, we picked a bank that does not permit credit / debit cards to be issued to non profit organizations. This way no random employee or volunteer can get their hands on a bank card and go wild. So, Our bank does not issue credit cards, and AT&T's FLAWED DESIGN, can not process a business checking account. The only method left to pay is to walk cash into a physical store and pay the bill.

Well, Guess what ? AS another security measure with our bank, you can't just go to the bank and withdraw cash from a non profit checking account as our account requires 2 signatures. The way you accomplish pulling out cash is to write a check to yourself. And, in order to get a 2nd signature on a check, I have to get approval from my board of directors. So, here is the joke (on us, thanks AT&T) In spite of the all the extra security we took to set up an account so that no one can embezzle money from us, I now have to start writing checks to myself to pull cash out of the bank, in order to pay the AT&T phone bill. So for about a year, each month I had to write out checks to myself and make it look like I am embezzling money.

Third Issue :

AT&T turns us over to a collection agency for the OLD account.

About 6 months after we got the new "no penalty" account, I get a phone call one day from a collection agency. At first I thought it was a complete scam, yet another one of the many phone scams. But no, it was a real collection agency.

The guy on the phone, being the typical collection agent, talks condescending to you and wonders why you are such a deadbeat you cant pay the $60 balance on your phone account. I ask him, what phone account ? He states "The phone account from AT&T for the phone number "xxx.xxx.xxxx"

I pause for a second and say, "Dude, did you check your system and see what number you just called me at ? You just called me AT THAT SAME NUMBER. So how can I have an outstanding 6 month old balance for an account when I am talking to you on the very same phone number ?" He stated that his records indicate we have an old balance for $60, and now with collection costs and penalties, the total was going to be close to $400, "How do you play to pay that today ?" I told him that he needs to go back to AT&T and check his and their records and prove to me the origin of the debt since I am talking to him on the very same phone number, on an AT&T account. Its not possible to have an unpaid balance that is 6 months old or they would have shut the phone off. We hang up and I am thinking it is a complete scam he just tried to pull.

Surprisingly, he did exactly that. He called back a few days later with more account details. It turns out with the information he tells me, I realize that it is from the old, original account we had for 9 years. Apparently when the sales rep converted us to the new "no penalty" account, there was a prorated outstanding balance on the account. But, as stated above, when she killed off the account, it wiped out all of our billing records, online access, all account history, and the automatic payment setup to our checking account. So AT&T never got the final automated payment and shows us for an outstanding balance. No one EVER called us to let us know this. The first contact about this we got was from the collection agency. Man was I furious, A perfectly clean record and now AT&T turns us over to a collection agency for their screw up ?

Another couple of hours on the phone to get to the right department. I had to prove to AT&T that I had a separate account with the exact same phone number. The first 5 people I talked to tried to convince me it was impossible to have 2 different accounts with the same phone number, because every time they tried to pull up the account, the only thing they saw was the new GoPhone account, as the old account got wiped out. But after about 2 hours or so on the phone, we finally got the right person and got a payment made. And, if I remember correctly, they used our business checking account to make the final payment but still yet can not process the business checking account for the GoPhone account.

I am going to stop for now as I have been typing for an hour. But there are numerous more events and experiences like this from over the past 3+ years. Every once in a while after they screw something up they try to placate me and give us a small credit. But this has really gotten to the point of disgust. And now, our phone will be off in the morning for the exact same type of stupidity from AT&T. Again, I have to play janitor and clean up their mess once more

If someone that has the money, like Bill Gates, Pierre Omidyar, or Larry Ellison ever decided to take on AT&T and offer some real customer service to phone users, it would be game over for AT&T. I think AT&T would be finished within a couple of years.