We have our home phone and internet service through AT&T. Last week I get a call from them asking to speak to my husband. Well, we were in the middle of some family fun playing outside in the yard and I didn’t want to call him inside so I said he wasn’t available and could I take a message. The person proceeds to tell me that because we are such wonderful long time customers, they have a special offer for us to thank us for our service! Aw, how nice! Just about a month ago, we upgraded our DSL to a bit higher speed and that added about $12/month to the internet portion of our bill. The man tells me they are going to upgrade us to DSL 6.0 from the 3.0 that we have now! Just for being excellent customers! Oh thank you! Wait. The man starts babbling really fast and I can’t understand him all that well to begin with because English is obviously not his first language but I catch somewhere in there that our bill will be going up. Hold on there a second! You said you were calling to offer me something fabulous for being a wonderful customer and now you are telling me that this fabulous special offer that is just for ME because I am so amazing is really just a way to get me to pay you more money? So I stop him and say “Wait wait wait. Is this free? Or are you charging me? because if you are charging me, I am not interested. You told me you were upgrading me because I am a superb customer not because you want to squeeze more money out of me.” The man proceeds to say “Oh, okay, well, you don’t want to pay extra. We have a package we can offer you to upgrade on your phone service. You can get 5 features on your phone – call waiting, caller id, blah blah blah”. Okay, fine. Add that to my service for free because I am an awesome customer. Thank you. Then he keeps talking and I hear “blah blah phone service blah blah $31 blah blah”. Well, wait a minute. We’re cheap. We pay $19 for our landline. We have nothing fancy attached to it. We’re archaic and use an answering machine and not voicemail. We don’t have caller id. We just have a phone that rings. So when he said $31 I stopped him AGAIN and said “What do you mean $31? Did you just do it again? Try to talk me into signing up for something by saying that it was a special offer and acting like it was going to be free and it’s not? Goodbye.”
I’m not impressed, AT&T. I may be an excellent customer, but I’m not a stupid one.
Yep, most places want to reward your loyalty by asking you for more money. I don’t know how I’d make it in telesales. Ick.
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It’s nice to hear we’re not the only ones living in the dark ages of telephone service. I even have one phone that has a cord! Gasp! However, I might cry if they took away our DSL.
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I can’t remember the last time I even used a landline, but I DO remember how annoying those calls were!
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[...] 9. Sneaky AT&T customer service? RemodelingThisLife gives some good points on how it becomes sneaky. [...]
i have been in a telesales business over the last few years and it helped me earn more money’,`
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customer service should be put first with any kind of business-,”
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when we are looking at stores or companies, we are always looking for top customer service`~*
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some stores have really bad customer service while others have topnotch custmer service ;;’
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