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AT&T says it has big problems. A T-Mobile salesman showed me how big

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Re: AT&T says it has big problems. A T-Mobile salesman showed me how big

#71

Post by dimmke »

bsanr2 wrote: post #65
Talanes wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Consequently, most retail seems to focus on training employees to "not be bad" vs "being more good." More like they just don't give adequate training time at all. I've never had a retail job that gave as much time with the training material as the material itself said you'd spend with it.

Best Buy had very good training during the tenure of the previous CEO. It was emphasized as an important part of one's duties as an associate and incentivized with generous accommodations (I'm watching a large OLED I was able to buy for 1/3 retail; I was able to truthfully attest to its quality thereafter and made quite a few sales on that). My understanding is that good and plentiful accommodations are essentially g…

>training focuses less on product knowledge and more on high-margin service and branded payment upsells.

This to me is the death knell of brick and mortar retail. It's like this everywhere. There is absolutely no focus on actually helping a customer make a decision based on what they need/want. It's just a free mark to pitch whatever thing management is incentivizing. If I can't actually trust the intentions of a salesperson what on earth am I doing in there?

But let's be honest, even if there was a focus on product knowledge- it's almost always better to do research on the internet. You can get a much better lay of the land from many sources instead of just one person. The products will be cheaper by 10-20% on Amazon usually, and you get to read a ton of reviews. This just happened to me at Micro Center this past week. I was bored, decided to go into the store to look at KVM switches. A salesperson approaches and asks if I need help, it's clear immediately that he doesn't know anything about KVM switches and he's reading off the back of the box trying to figure out the answer when I ask him questions. I decide to buy the one I was already looking at before he approached and he put his sticker on it.

Afterwards, out of curiosity, I looked it up on Amazon. Was a full $20 cheaper. The switch ended up not even being able to support high refresh rates so I had to return it anyways.

Plus they all want you to sign up for their credit card and give them your email and zip code. It's super gross.

Re: AT&T says it has big problems. A T-Mobile salesman showed me how big

#72

Post by chasil »

easton wrote: post #7

AT&T's (corporate) store service is absolutely terrible. I have money, a working phone (or the SIM from a broken phone), and want to upgrade. Why can't I hand you the money and get a new phone without 20 minutes of tapping around on an iPad? And god forbid you have a business account, then it'll take thirty or forty minutes because they have to look through your account to see if there's anything to fix, and then som…

I am on RedPocket's "essentials" plan on AT&T, and I have swapped my SIM card twice, involving three different phones, since I activated.

If you have a new phone in hand, just swap. No need to go to the store.

Re: AT&T says it has big problems. A T-Mobile salesman showed me how big

#73

Post by reactspa »

AT&T customer here. The customer service interactions are abysmal.

I'm on a prepaid plan ($25/m all you can eat, but hi-speed internet taps out at 8GB... after that it's lo-speed internet).

I kept getting texts that my phone will stop working with AT&T's network in Feb next year for some reason (it won't). And that there was a free phone waiting for me at the local AT&T shop.

Cool. Why not get a free phone I thought. I went over to the store and showed the guy there the text. He said they were out of phones and gave me a number to call, and that they'd ship me a phone. (And the dude looked over my current phone and told me it would continue to work with the AT&T network after Feb).

I call that number, am put on hold. It takes 62 minutes to get through to a live human. Explain the situation to him. They send me a phone. It's a garbage phone that loses all charge in 2 days despite not being used. It's available for $40 on AT&T's website (with a prepaid plan). No biggie.

I still get those texts telling me there's a free phone waiting for me in my local AT&T shop.

----------

Another issue, on their website, when I was signing up for the prepaid plan (a year ago), I was forced to enter a "unit number" for my house... even though there is none. So I entered "Unit 0" and they accepted that.

Re: AT&T says it has big problems. A T-Mobile salesman showed me how big

#74

Post by selectodude »

hattmall wrote: post #17
bluedino wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Too bad their coverage in smaller cities and rural areas is still pretty bad.

This is less and less true. TMobile has rolled out 600mhz 5g on the old Nextel push to talk frequencies it acquired in the Sprint merger. Rural coverage is vastly improved, like far far exceeding the other two. At least in areas where Nextel had a serious presence.

iDEN was 800MHz, the 600MHz stuff is UHF spectrum from when all the OTA television channels went digital.

Re: AT&T says it has big problems. A T-Mobile salesman showed me how big

#75

Post by kube-system »

gnicholas wrote: post #63
bognition wrote: post #8

Last Monday I bought 2 iphone 13 pros. One from Apple and the other from Verizon. (The Apple Store app on my phone wouldn't let me upgrade a number that wasn't attached to my iCloud account. So I stupidly bought it from verizon) We got the 13 pros in the mail on friday and neither me nor my wife liked the phone and we decided to return them. The return with Apple was easy and smooth. At the verizon store the manager…

MVNOs are great. If you want to be on the Verizon network and happen to have Comcast, their xfinity mobile service is super cheap. You can buy one data pool and split it across your whole family, and the cost per GB is $15 or so. Unlike all the big carriers, they don't charge a per-line monthly access fee. I have five people on my family plan and the cost per line is almost always under $10/mo. If you need to be on A…

MVNOs are a mixed bag. Some are good, some cut every corner possible to reduce costs.

Re: AT&T says it has big problems. A T-Mobile salesman showed me how big

#76

Post by logosmonkey »

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.

Re: AT&T says it has big problems. A T-Mobile salesman showed me how big

#77

Post by logosmonkey »

logosmonkey wrote: post #76

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 tha…

When 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$.

Re: AT&T says it has big problems. A T-Mobile salesman showed me how big

#78

Post by throwawayboise »

henrikschroder wrote: post #67
bombcar wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The fact you haven’t switched lines yet speaks volumes for where they have you. Right where they want you.

When cell phones came to Sweden in the 90's, all the carriers did the exact same thing, offering phones and plans as bundles. But after a couple of years of fierce competition, margins were so thin that it was 100% obvious that any plan that came "with" a phone was essentially just their regular phone plans + a payment plan for the phone. You saved absolutely no money by paying for your phone through a carrier, and f…

The plans let people who can't afford a $2,000 phone get one.

Re: AT&T says it has big problems. A T-Mobile salesman showed me how big

#79

Post by gregkerzhner »

cbozeman wrote: post #62
ysavir wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think it's that simple. There's a lot involved in switch carriers, and it's worth taking the time to cool down from the initial frustration and evaluate your options more objectively.

> it's worth taking the time to cool down from the initial frustration No it isn't. Every single company in America needs to operate like Chick-Fil-A. You will never have a bad Chick-Fil-A experience. Ever. I've eaten there for over 25 years. The slightest problem with anything is immediately resolved to your satisfaction. And why is that? Because there's competition, and because they want to be the best fast food re…

Chick-fill-a might be a bad example given their history with LGBT folks.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chick-fil-A_and_LGBT_people

Re: AT&T says it has big problems. A T-Mobile salesman showed me how big

#80

Post by NoPicklez »

I worked in a large Telco store as a sales consultant for around 5 years and I have some views on this, having served thousands of customers.

Organisations such as T-Mobile, AT&T and even the Telco I used to work for in Australia are fortunately/unfortunately made up of people just like you and I. This means that your experience of dealing with a telco or a brand is highly dependant on the person you speak with in store. These people aren't all incredibly motivated people, nor are they all at their very best everyday like they need to be as people in front of customers. It's no excuse, but it is a factor.

I was around before and at the point the digital waiting line came into play and it is overall better than not having one. In this story, the problem is that clearly the store didn't have enough staff serving customers to visually justify that the store was busy enough to put someone in a queue. I worked in a shopping mall so customers who walked into a our visibly very busy store were happy that they could get some food or continue shopping while waiting.

With regards to availability of staff, where I worked we followed a "My customer my responsibility model" where it was your responsibility to follow and resolve a customers problem. As stores provided not just sales but also customer service across consumer and business mobility products and internet services. The tricky part is that a customer might come into the store with a complex billing problem and it require almost an hour to resolve. In a store of perhaps 4 active consultants, on a busy day if 2-3 people are working on complex customer support queries, you wont have enough people available to advise people on what mobile to buy.

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