Rain, AT&T, and Customer Service

Good morning all! How is your day going so far? I hope it's going fabulous for you, and it has certainly been interesting for me so far. When I woke up, it was pouring rain with thunder and lightning, and that is still going on as we speak...odds are it will go all day, at least that's how it's looking to me. I'm not exactly a fan of rain, since I find it to be a huge inconvenience most of the time, but I can handle rain today as long as Thursday is clear. If my Busch Gardens trip with my friend Gretchen is messed up by rain, I am going to be one angry angry girl.

And now on to the second thing we're dealing with today. For the past few years, we have had Verizon Wireless phone service, as well as wireless internet through a USB device. Recently, we made the switch to AT&T, mostly because I wanted an iPhone, and also because they offer an unlimited DSL internet package that would work for multiple computers at once. When we switched, everything seemed as though it might go smoothly, but it's all been downhill from there. My parents' cell phones were shipped to our old address(thank goodness it's a UPS Store box that we kept open!), there were problems setting up the home phone service and DirecTV(which we ordered through AT&T), and my iPhone and internet(once we got that set up) have both been having some problems. Once we finally got everything set up, we thought we were finally done with it, but no. The home phones barely work, and to call down to the cottage, which is my grandparents' phone, you get weird noises as you are talking...dial tones, ringing, answering machine recordings. It's actually quite interesting to listen to, but a definite pain in the butt when you want to be talking to someone and not hearing strange sounds in your ear. Of course we called to get this problem fixed, and so far we have had three technicians out here, but no fixing has occured. We did find out that all the phone lines underground are tangled and need to be fixed, but all they are doing is sending more people out to tell us that's the problem, instead of sending out someone to fix it. Hopefully today we will finally get it fixed. It's really annoying, and my internet is affected by the tangled phone lines as well...just typing this blog is hard when my computer keeps freezing due to painfully slow internet.

All of this leads me to the final topic of this blog, customer service. Now I know most companies try their hardest, and I am sure that even though we are getting less than stellar service, AT&T is trying to fix this problem. But if you think about it, most people today do not get very good customer service when they go somewhere with a problem. How many times have you heard a story from someone you know about the ordeal they went through with customer service for their phone, or their furniture, or their television, or their returns in the grocery store. Generally speaking, customer service in most companies is falling by the wayside, and this could be partially due to the fact that most large companies are now growing so large that each customer cannot possibly receive individualized attention. This is understandable, but customer service is vitally important to a business, and perhaps companies should focus just a bit more on giving people quality service than on being the biggest and best. The true best company is the one that offers their customers excellent service at an excellent value and doesn't slack on customer service.

Until Next Time,
Live and Love(and good luck with any customer service problems!),
Melanie