AT&T: anti-marketing ninjas at work

So I am finally got my iPhone. Per the earlier post, my web order disappeared into automated customer service limbo yet was impossible to cancel until I called a live sales rep. Meanwhile the price dropped $50 so I place the order again and it goes through with me $50 richer and ATT $50 poorer. And with me, a long time AT&T customer who is now a “new” wireless customer, holding a vastly reduced favorable view of the company. How is this good for the shareholders?

For people who have to call customer service on their lunch hour, stories like this are just more yadda-yadda. But for the marketer came up with the promotion that drew me to AT&T at this particular moment, and is getting reviewed for it possibly with their job on the line, it’s not at all trivial. You did your best work, you got the click, and then the order was deep-sixed by a combination of bad IT architecture and moronic overview by whatever human is supposed to spot-check to ensure all is going well.

I will not bore you with the details of yet another poor customer service experience beyond citing a couple of particularly telling details:

* “Unfortunately, either we have not heard from you in several days, or you have chosen to cancel your order. In either case, this e-mail confirms your order cancellation”. That was in an email I got from AT&T during the first attempt to order. But notice we’re talking about two totally different customer relationship scenarios, and they’ve chosen to respond to both of them in the same email.

Why would this happen? Because some human life form has decided it is “too complicated” to have two different stock emails to respond to two different scenarios that create the same result. The computers don’t care! It is people thinking for the computers that is causing the problem here.

* Now I’ve finally got an order placed, and a confirmation email arrives: “Congratulations! You’re now part of the largest wireless community in America—71 million and growing! You will receive your new wireless phone in a few days.” Well that’s interesting news, since the original order confirmation promised two-day guaranteed delivery! There is also a tracking number in the email but when I click on it, it takes me to AT&T’s home page!

So recognizing it as a UPS number I go to their tracking page and do indeed find the package quickly and discover it actually will be delivered on time in spite of AT&T’s hedging.
Why didn’t they actually confirm that they were delivering on schedule in the confirming email? Why didn’t they reference my specific smart decision to buy an iPhone? You guessed it… they send the same confirming email to EVERYONE, regardless of what offer they responded to.

Just imagine the phone calls to customer service this generates. But there is apparently no consequence and no human cost to AT&T because they have no intention of answering those calls. They’ll be led through a phone tree and ultimately disconnected as I was in my first encounter.

I feel like such a whiner in describing all this but I actually do have a point worth making. In this terrible economy, when every company should be scrambling for every last potential order to keep its bottom line healthy and to keep employees employed, AT&T is running its business like there is money, and orders, to burn.

Much of this definitely goes to the laziness of midlevel IT and customer service folks who are scheming ways to go home on time, not to execute their job which should be to make things easier for the customer. But it also goes back to a hubris that has existed from the tim companies like AT&T established their websites… because face it, the web experience with any phone company is terrible.

What they did: get on the web early, because they’re an Important Company that needs a “web presence”, then cobble on an e-commerce function as an afterthought. Now the tail is wagging the dog because their ecommerce engine doesn’t work and the ridiculous official explanations sound like one of those clone commanders in Star Wars. What they should have done: emulate sites like amazon.com. (or, just emulate amazon.com) which realize that no order can be allowed to get away.