Page 2 of 2

Re: AT&T 2 missed appointments

Posted: Wed Sep 18, 2019 3:51 pm
by Big Telecom Sucks
I had a miserable experience with AT&T and Sonic last year that not only involved multiple missed appointments, but downtime with no service at all.

I don't think anyone will dispute that AT&T sucks. They didn't have to care when they were the monolithic Ma Bell, and they don't have much more reason to care now that they've been split into Baby Bells to terrorize captive customers, only in smaller chunks.

Various tidbits gleaned from my experience:

AT&T is short staffed. The tech who eventually showed up and fixed the issues was brought in on temporary assignment from another part of California. He seemed to enjoy his lodging and per diem, but was ready to head home.

Due to that, and the indifference in their scheduling office, appointments will be missed. What are you going to do about it? Drop them for someone else? LOL.

The personnel in the provisioning office are sloppy, don't do their jobs correctly, and don't care either. That's just not my observation, but was evident in the frustration I overheard in the conversations between the tech and the people flipping the switches. Not a good sign when the field tech has to repeatedly straighten out the people in the office because they're incapable of applying even a modicum of critical thought. Much of the service call involved the tech waiting around for someone in the office to do something.

Despite Sonic's status as a wholesale "enterprise class" customer, resellers take a back seat in priority, with an resulting bias spoken and unspoken. That was also betrayed by the tech.

I have great sympathy for the Sonic personnel who have to deal with AT&T on our behalf, because they're stuck between a rock and a hard place, and take direct fire from unhappy customers through no fault of their own. The best they can do is to act as a envoy of sorts, but it doesn't put them in any better position with regard to AT&T. In effect, all they can do is pass messages back and forth as the intermediary, but are just as powerless if AT&T doesn't respond.

Sonic isn't perfect, but they only have a certain amount of control, and to their credit, will try to make things right on their side of the bargain, which they should, as ultimately, they are principal that users have the contractual relationship with.

In a perfect world, we (users and Sonic alike) wouldn't be reliant on AT&T, but that will take time and money to accomplish, as well as FCC leadership that actually serves the people, not the industry.