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.