Dear Sir/Madam
I am writing to make an official complaint about the ‘service’ that AT&T has been providing me in the past two months.
My husband and I decided to join ATT for internet and TV in the summer of 2011. At the time of our signing up to your service, we were told that ATT U-verse TV is NOT available in our area and therefore we will have Direct TV. We were told that it doesn’t make any difference because we’re going to be billed through ATT and the internet and TV will come as a bundle and that’s how we have to pay for it. Since the time we first signed up until now, my bill has appeared on our myAT&T page and I pay for it to YOU. There’s no mention of how this bill is divided between AT&T and Direct TV, and, frankly, I do not even care since you are the service provider to us, we are paying YOU.
Not knowing any better, we agreed to this arrangement. However, after 6 months or so, in January 2012, we decided that we would like to change our Direct TV to ATT U-verse because somebody told us that it was available in our neighborhood.
So, in January 2012, I called ATT and explained to one of your representatives what we would like to do. This person agreed that the ATT U-verse TV is indeed available for us now and signed us up for it, agreeing with us on a date when the technician could come and install it. NOT AT ANY POINT during this conversation did he mention that the ATT U-verse TV is NOT going to be a replacement for our Direct TV but an ADDITIONAL TV service. We were under the impression that you are REPLACING the Direct TV service with the U-verse TV service. It did not occur to us in our wildest dreams that your representative would cynically sell us a new service when he could see on the screen in front of him that we ALREADY had a TV service!!
Your technician duly arrived the following Monday and (after mentioning that in fact U-verse TV WAS available in our neighborhood last summer too so we should have got that in the first place!) installed our new ATT U-verse TV. We were puzzled by him not taking the bits and pieces that belonged to the Direct TV, but he said it’s for someone else to collect. Not knowing any better, we started using our U-verse TV and would have lived happily ever after, had I not gotten an e-mail from Direct TV the next day, advertizing a deal for new channels. That completely puzzled me because I couldn’t understand why they would be sending me ads when we do not have their service any more.
The following day (we’re still in January) I made my first call to you guys. Since then I have contacted you 7 times! Yes, SEVEN times! Let me tell you about the results:
- most of the time I spend between 12-25 minutes on the phone, mostly hanging on, waiting for your representatives to either answer my calls or to get back to me. The longest time my call lasted was 35 minutes (today)-and then I was DISCONNECTED!
- 5 times I was disconnected while I was holding on and waiting for your representatives to get back to me with an answer.
- Twice I managed to get through to someone who was able to at least PARTIALLY deal with my question: one was someone who actually helped me on behalf of Direct TV and told me that if I want to cancel the service, it would cost me over $300!! The second person today was able to get me in a conference call with someone representing Direct TV, only to be told that it was the wrong person, and while they were transferring me and the ATT representative to the correct person, the phone disconnected.
- 5 times I talked to representatives who couldn’t even grasp what I was talking about: so they tried to connect me to someone else, but ultimately dropped my call.
- Only two people in the past 2 months were able to understand the problem I was describing-pity they couldn’t help me because the line was disconnected!
- Even though I explicitly ask to talk to a manager EVERY SINGLE TIME, thus far I haven’t been able, to because your representatives seemed to have dropped my call/put the phone down on me rather than connect me to one.
You can imagine how utterly exasperated and fed up I feel with your so called “services”. You are a phone company, among other things, and you’re unable to connect your customers to others without disconnecting them? You should be able to figure out what services are available to different neighborhoods at any one time, you should advice your customers about issues like possibly ending up with two TV services BEFORE you sell them services, you should be able to resolve issues between YOUR customers and Direct TV more effectively since YOU sold your customers Direct TV in the first place and YOU are billing them for Direct TV services!!!
We ended up with 2 (TWO!!!) TV services due to your representatives misinformation/lack of awareness of what kind of services you’re already providing to us/negligence (I daren’t even think about him blatantly and cynically misguiding us and deliberately not mentioning that we should cancel our Direct TV before ordering yet another one, because it’s NOT a replacement!).
I would like you to 1) cancel our Direct TV service and work it out with them so that we don’t end up having to pay over $300 for a mistake that YOU made 2) give me an explanation regarding your totally and utterly ineffective customer “service” and 3) convince me please why I should stay with you guys altogether, when you seem to be just about the worst Internet/TV providers we have had so far.
I very much look forward to your prompt reply.
Kind regards, Gabriella
[edited for privacy]
