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Att was destroyed as soon as they sold to cingular. I worked as a billing call center rep for Cingular when they bought them. The spent millions to rebrand ever
by logosmonkey 5y ago
Att was destroyed as soon as they sold to cingular. I worked as a billing call center rep for Cingular when they bought them. The spent millions to rebrand everything with AT&T including signs at small ballpark fields etc. They had a bounty system where you could get paid if you found an old AT&T sign that hadn't been converted. About six months in they realized that Cingular's brand was despised by customers and that AT&T was really well liked, at least on the cell side. As someone who had to do plan conversions it was obvious that every Cingular option was a huge downgrade compared to the AT&T plans. Across the board their service was worse, their plans were worse and the customer service we were allowed to provide was worse.
Finally they decided to convert everything to AT&T to try and salvage their brand. Overall it worked for a little while I think. But ever since working for them I have never and will never be one of their customers. They were a truly awful company to work for and tied our hands when trying to help customers.
- logosmonkey 5y agoWhen I say they tied our hands one example would be that they had system hard caps on how much you could refund a customer for incorrect billings. Specifically 75$ per day per account. So if a customer was legitimately owed 300$ then you would need to write it down and each day refund them 75$ until they were refunded their due. I actively kept up with that but if you got someone else who didn't care as much, well good luck ever getting that 300$.
- reilly3000 5y agoThat just seems like such a waste of customer service time, and would chew up more time if the customer persisted, and more money if they pursued legal action of any sort. How short sighted can they be?
- lr1970 5y ago> Att was destroyed as soon as they sold to cingular. The story of AT&T and Cingular is much weirder, see [0]. Once there was AT&T Wireless that became Cingular (with the help of SBC). Then SBC bought AT&T (landline) then the combined AT&T bought Cingular that became AT&T Wireless again. [0] https://www.att.com/Common/merger/files/pdf/Cingular_timeline7.pdf https://www.att.com/Common/merger/files/pdf/Cingular_timelin... EDIT: typos
- afn 5y agoIt’s the T-1000 of corporations. http://www.phonenews.com/images/2007/1/colbert-report-roasts-att-cingular.mp4 http://www.phonenews.com/images/2007/1/colbert-report-roasts...