how to kill customer loyalty in three and a half months

It only took three and a half months, but I finally got a full refund from AT&T*.

My family and I have been loyal to AT&T wireless for...well, I don't actually know how long. But It's definitely over 15 years. At one point we were with Cingular, but came over when they merged with AT&T. And, for the most part, we've been happy.

My trouble started this past summer -- August 8 to be exact -- when I went to their store in Floral Park** to buy a new phone. Sadly, they didn't have the phone I wanted in stock. But, they told me, they could order it. I could upgrade right then and there. They could set up an installment plan on my account*** and  I just had to pay the sales tax right then and there. And when I come in to get the phone they'd help me move all my content from the old to the new.

In retrospect, I was stupid to agree to this. I should have either gone elsewhere or simply come back at a later date when they expected to have the phone in stock. But I was eager, and I agreed. Live and learn.

The sales representative called when they got the phone in, but she was going on vacation the next day. I preferred to have her set up the new phone, so she told me I could wait to pick it up until after her vacation. I came in on her first day back. And the store didn't have the phone. In the intervening week and a half, they were being audited. The manager didn't want to have extra equipment sitting around,*** so he sent it back. The store was now well-stocked with that model, but they couldn't give us one of those. It had to be the specific phone that was ordered for me. And they couldn't just unravel the purchase until AT&T's warehouse acknowledged receipt of the phone. But not to worry -- that'll happen soon enough and we can start again. But it didn't happen. To this day AT&T's warehouse has not received the phone.

So, I had paid $120.75 in sales tax during that first visit. My August bill included a one-time $30 upgrade fee (plus tax). And, starting with that bill, AT&T would be adding installments of $46.67 for the phone as well as $5 (+ tax!) "Next Up"**** charges.

And so began my fight. Initially, I was content to wait it out until the warehouse scanned the phone in. But as time went by without that happening, I got antsy. At this point I don't recall the exact sequence of conversations, and I won't try to give a blow-by-blow account.

But I made repeated calls to customer service. I would dutifully explain what had happened. And each time, I had to go through the same story and answer the same questions. The rep would promise to get it settled, only to be stuck by the fact that AT&T didn't have the phone. Because of that I'd have to take it up with the store. But when I went to the store, they insisted they couldn't help me until the warehouse acknowledged receipt of the phone. Once that happened, the whole upgrade would be unraveled, and they could then refund the sales tax.***** Until that happened, I would have to stick to calling customer service. And so it went -- customer service said I had to deal with the store, and the store said I had to deal with customer service. I was stuck in the middle. A couple times I tried having customer service talk to the store. That briefly gave me some hope, but it amounted to nothing.

I should acknowledge that, early on, AT&T refunded the $30 upgrade fee. That gave me unjustified hope, though in retrospect I am guessing that they did that because they could see that I wasn't using the new phone. At any rate, that was a small victory.

I was dealing with a seemingly unending series of broken promises. customer service reps would open cases and swear that there would be a resolution. But the cases would be closed because the warehouse hadn't received the phone so they didn't have satisfactory evidence that I never received the phone. Even though the store manager told them repeatedly that that was the case.

Eventually, in early October there was a breakthrough. One of the phone reps was able to break through and, with her manager, get the process started to actually remove the monthly installments from my phone and reimburse me for the installments I had already been charged. I'm not really sure why that call -- or that rep -- was different from the others. I suspect it was simply a matter of her being more dedicated to her job than the others, and my getting her on that call was just a matter of the luck of the draw. She was able and willing to take an extra step that the others weren't. And the transactions that she initiated (which inexplicably took more than a week to complete) did represent the bulk of the charges. And the case notes that she made did help with the resolution of the remaining items. 

The remaining items were the "Next Up" charges and the sales tax. Even though my October bill reflected a refund of the installments I had paid, it still included a $5 "Next Up" charge. I still had to make a couple  more phone calls, and explain the whole story a couple more times******. But eventually I got a rep to refund the "Next Up" charges and remove them from future bills.

But he couldn't help me with the sales tax. For that, he needed me to provide the number of the credit card that I used when I paid the tax*******. Under normal circumstances, this wouldn't have been a problem. But in the intervening months there had a been a fraudulent charge on that card, so I had closed it and shredded the card. I had nothing with the full account number on it. I called the issuer of the card, but they wouldn't give me the card number over the phone. Or by email. I'd have to wait for them to snailmail me a letter with the full account number. That took another couple of weeks.

I finally got the letter yesterday morning, November 27. Armed with the credit card number, I called customer service. I explained the story. I asked her to read the case notes. And she apologized, but she can't do anything about the tax I had paid because the warehouse still hasn't logged the phone back in. And have I tried going back to the store?

At this point, I was addressing the rep in an odd mix of rage and pleading. "Don't send me back to the store; that won't help. The last person I spoke to promised that if I provide the credit card number he could process a refund." She had me on hold for a long time. She came back and apologized. She was, she explained, trying to figure out what she could do. "You can pay me the money you guys took from me! Either credit my account or send me a check. I don't care which! But it's been more than three and a half months!" At this point I didn't think that I was helping my cause. But I was just so frustrated. It was like I was watching some other person in my body screaming/pleading into the phone.

And, to my surprise, it worked. She added credits to my account -- one credit for $60, and five credits for $12 each. If I'm not mistaken, that means that, technically, she wasn't applying a refund of the tax, but using some limited discretionary ability to apply credits to customer accounts. Which means that she still couldn't refund the tax, but she took mercy on my and did what she could.

The fact is, she gave me a total of $120 in credits. So technically, I'm still out 75 cents********. And, yeah, I have to let go of that, even though it rankles way more than it should. If I were, through sheer clumsiness, to lose a $20 bill to the wind, that would not bother me as much as this 75 cents.

Lessons learned? Any time I want to upgrade to a new phone in the future, I'll buy elsewhere -- probably from the Samsung Store. And if I have to go to an AT&T store, it won't be the one in Floral Park. I also found a few things that I particularly frustrating. The following is a (probably incomplete) list:

• Several times, after I spent hours on the phone only to get nowhere, the phone rep would close the call by asking me if I was satisfied with the service provided. Invariably, these reps would act surprised and offended when I said no. Excuse me, but your company is ripping me off to the tune of more than $1500, and you are unable to help me. Why should I be satisfied?
• Several times, reps would raise the question of why I took so long to pick up the phone. At least once, someone told me that their policy is to return equipment that's not picked up in 72 hours -- though the sales rep had told me it could wait until after her vacation. A couple times, people noted that equipment has to be picked up within two weeks or it gets returned -- though I had come to pick it up within that two-week time frame. This whole line of discussion was frustrating because it was tempting to debate it with them But that debate obfuscated the central issue. My frustration wasn't about the fact that they had returned the phone to the warehouse; it was about the fact that, having returned it to the warehouse, they seemed to still expect me to pay for it.
• I hated the repeated insincere apologies. Apologies are meaningless if you're not fixing the problem.
• I hated it when the store manager, responding to my complaint about how much time and energy I had to put into getting them to fix their fuck-up, noted that she had just spent an hour on the phone trying to help. Helping customers is part of her job -- especially when the problem was caused by a breakdown in AT&T's procedures. And she was being paid to deal with it. I wasn't. Now, if they were actually planning to pay me for the time I spent trying to track this down, I might have felt different about this aspect.

The big question is whether I will stay with AT&T. I understand that, sometimes, issues arise. But this whole episode takes customer service failure to a whole new level.
___________________________

*Actually, not full. There's still another 75 cents. But I'll eat that and call it a day. More details in the post.

**I don't know how it works with other carriers, since it's been so long since I have been with another carrier. Maybe it's similar. At any rate, with AT&T you can pay for the phone in 30 monthly installments. Essentially, it's an interest-free loan. Of course, the sales tax cannot be figured into the installments. You have to pay the sales tax when you set up the installment plan.

***Seriously. I don't understand why it's so difficult to say "this is a phone that we ordered for a customer who has not yet picked it up.

****I would learn the "Next Up" was a sales feature. If I sign up for it with the installment plan, and pay the charge every month, then (once I have paid for half of the phone) I can upgrade early and AT&T will absorb the cost of the yet-unpaid installments. I did not agree to the "Next Up program, and I would have turned it down had it been explained to me.

*****One element that boggles my mind is that the store manager insisted that I would have to make another trip to the store to get the sales tax refunded. For some reason she could not (or would not) adequately explain, they would not be able to do that by phone.

******If I have to say "No, I didn't return the phone. The store returned it instead of giving it to me" one more time...

*******I have no idea why that should be a requirement. He could see that I had paid the tax -- and he could even give me the last four digits of the card number.

********Which is a spit in the ocean compared to the time and energy I spent on this ordeal, as well as the cost of gas and wear and tear on the car related to the repeated trips to the store in Floral Park.*********

*********And I implore my reader not to patronize that store.