Christopher Herot's Weblog

AT&T Customer Service

I never thought I would be citing AT&T Wireless or any other cellular operator for excellence in customer service, but I have to say I was impressed with my recent interaction with them.

Last month I received a bill which inexplicably charged me "international" rates for domestic, i.e. free, text messages.  I called the 800 number and a very nice if somewhat puzzled representative admitted that other customers had been having the same problem and credited my account.  So far, so good - I got similar treatment from Verizon when they were working out the bugs in their billing system.  But what happened next truly impressed me.   Since a new billing period had already begin, and the problem was likely a continuing one, he would make sure my next bill was proactively repaired.  Even more impressive, I soon received the following email:

From: AT&T Email Customer Care for Wireless
Sent: Wednesday, November 28, 2007 1:33 PM
To: CHEROT@xxxxx.xxx
Subject: Re: Cingular Wireless Customer Email - Northeast - [CUST]

Dear Mr. Herot,
Thank you for taking the time to e-mail AT&T regarding your text messages being billed as international. I am happy to help you with your inquiry and I apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused.

 Upon reading your e-mail I have reviewed your account and found that this is a known issue. We are currently working to fix the problem, but unfortunately at this time I don't have a resolution date.

 At this time your account was issued an $11.00 credit on 11/26/2007 forthese charges for the billing period 10/09-11/08. For the billing period of 11/09-12/08 once the bill prints we will adjust the charges and contact you with the current balance. We don't want you to have to worry about this each month until the problem is fixed. We will set commitments for each month to adjust and contact you with correct balance until the problem is fixed.

 I want to take this opportunity to apologize again for this inconvenience; we are doing everything possible to resolve this issue for you.

 I hope that the information provided has been helpful and has resolved all of your questions. If you need further assistance, feel free to reply to this e-mail or contact customer service at 1-800-331-0500 or611 from your AT&T phone.

 Again, we thank you for allowing us the opportunity to assist you with your account. If we can be of further assistance, please contact us at http://www.att.com/wireless.

As always, thank you for choosing AT&T!

Sincerely,

Becky Ferris
AT&T
Online Customer Care Professional

Not only did they promise to take care of future bills, but they did.  AT&T's billing is no worse than the competition, and I realize that occasionally things don't work as planned, but this example illustrates that an essential aspect of any customer service regime is admitting that mistakes will be made and giving the support reps the tools they need to deliver service to the customer.

Well done, AT&T.

 

Verizon vs. Vonage - Claim Construction

Thanks to Brough Turner, I have posted the claim construction for the recent patent case between Verizon and Vonage.  As I learned from my experience as an expert witness, claim construction is the painstaking process in which individual words of the claims of the patent are examined in the context of the specification of the patent in order to assign meanings to them, for example in this case deciding if "name" refers to the called party or to the called party's device.  Claim construction is a matter of law and is therefor decided by the a, whose decisions are rendered in the above-referenced document.  All the jury gets to decide is whether the claims (as so understood) are infringed by the defendant.  As Fred Goldstein has pointed out, the jury was not asked to decide if these patents are valid.  Good thing for Verizon, since the claims at issue are for looking up a name and returning an address, something that's been going on in the Internet at least since Paul Mockapetris invented of DNS in 1983.  I expect this will be in the courts for some time to come.

Iowa Hack Heats Up

The battle between Cingular/AT&T Wireless and various users of the Iowa Hack has opened on a new front.  AT&T has started blocking access from its subscribers to phone numbers belonging to FreeConference.com.   AT&T spokesman Mark Siegel has been widely quoted as saying the action is appropriate because under its wireless terms of service agreements AT&T’s wireless service is for calls “between one person and another person, not between one person and many.”  I haven't been able to find that language on AT&T's web site, not have I seen any links to it.  I think most of AT&T's subscribers would be surprised to find that they were prohibited from using their phones to make conference calls.

Siegal also admitted that AT&T objected to companies such as FreeConference.com making use of an anomaly in the FCC-mandated termination charges that allow rural carriers in states such as Iowa to charge several times the average rate for connecting calls from AT&T to subscribers (or partners such as FreeConference).

FreeConference is not taking this sitting down.  The company, which also does business as Global Conference Partners LLC and FreeConferenceCalls.com  has filed a lawsuit (1:07-cv-00574-PLF) in the U.S District Court for the District of Columbia alleging that AT&T has violated the Sherman Antitrust Act and the Communications Act, by not connecting the calls or paying for the calls it has connected.

Meanwhile Free Conferencing Corp, creators of FreeConferenceCall.com (not to be confused with FreeConferenceCalls.com), has been alerting bloggers to the opening of its own blog which says that they, too, have been cut off by both Cingular and Sprint.

In related cases, AT&T has filed an answer to the suit filed against it for non-payment in New York and filed a motion in Iowa to have the New York case decided there along with its original suit.

Superior Telephone Coperative vs. AT&T

In a complaint filed in the U.S. District Court - Southern District of New York, Farmers Telephone Company and Superior Telephone Cooperative, two of the defendants in the Iowa free calls lawsuit, accused AT&T of not paying almost $8.9 million in termination charges owed since October, 2006.   They further allege that AT&T is engaging in prohibited "self-help" action by refusing to pay instead of going through the mandated dispute resolution and complaint processes.  According to the complaint, this is not the first time AT&T has engaged in this tactic.

This cut-off in cash flow was most likely the proximate cause of the shuttering of futurephone.com.

Stephen Colbert on AT&T/Cingular Merger

On Monday's show, Stephen Colbert described the merger of AT&T and Cingular.

Here's what AT&T looked like before the breakup in the 1980s.

And here's what AT&T looks like today.