I’ve been using AT&T’s mobile service for the past 12 years. Although I’ve generally been happy with the service, I’ve never liked their pushy salespeople (especially when it comes to ‘promoting’ their internet and TV services – which I’ve succumbed to twice, before rapidly ditching it again). But recently they absolutely outdid themselves.
I’ve had a group family plan for several years, which cost me $75 a month (++ taxes and fees..) for the plan then a cost per phone line on top of this this. For various reasons, my daughter (ever the contrarian) was with Sprint, but back in September 2018, I moved her back to AT&T to take advantage of an offer on a new iPhone. Transferring a phone (and keeping your existing number) is relatively straightforward (albeit a bit convoluted), but we went into the Sprint store and had her number released, then went into the AT&T store, to add a new line with the same number (which, incidentally, also used to be with AT&T before she switched to Sprint) added to my existing family plan.
The next month my phone bill went up pretty sharply, but as the Sales Rep said, the first bill after you add a line or get a new phone is always extra-large because of one-off fees and adjustments, but it would settle down after that. And it did drop a bit after that first month, so I promptly forgot about it. I’m on auto-pay and paperless billing specifically so I don’t have to go checking my bill every month.
Fast-forward to June 2019, and I happened to notice that my phone bill went up by $20 plus change. Curious, I went online and checked my bill, and saw that AT&T had increased the cost of their group plans by $10++ a month. Not unreasonable, inflation, etc. But wait, what?? If a group plan has increased by $10++ how come my bill went up by $20++? So I looked a bit closer, and discovered what AT&T had done.
When I added my daughter’s phone to my family plan, what AT&T did was create a second group plan on my account, and add my daughter to that! So I then had two group plans, one of which had only one person in it! Which makes no sense at all! At least not from a customer point of view, but if you look at it from a service provider view, it makes perfect sense – because AT&T could now charge me for TWO group plans! Which is exactly what they did. For 10 months.
I immediately got on chat with Customer Service who noted (somewhat obviously) “this is an error”, and promptly corrected my account so that I only had one group, with four people in it (as initially requested), and confirmed that my bill would now go down by $75++ a month. “That’s great”, I said, “but when can I expect to see a refund for everything that I’ve been overcharged?” Needless to say, that’s where things slowed down.
After saying there was nothing he could do, the Customer Service Rep passed me to his supervisor, who checked the chat history before saying that this was going back so far (10 months at this stage) that they probably couldn’t do anything about it at this stage, and suggested that I should have been paying more attention to my bill. Which maybe I should have done, but I don’t think it should be incumbent upon me as a customer to check that my service provider isn’t ripping me off (which they clearly were). And I certainly didn’t ‘deserve it’ just because I didn’t notice that they were doing it! I escalated again, and got passed to his supervisor, who told me that the best he could do was offer a one-time credit of $75 on my next bill. I politely (!) declined. So he said they would have to escalate it further, and “someone will notify you right away once we have an updateâ€.
[Narrator voice: But no-one did notify him.]
A month went by and I hadn’t heard back, so in mid-July I called again. The person I spoke to managed to find the details of my initial contact (thank heavens for everything being recorded “for training purposes”), but noted that a case had not been opened for my complaint, so it wasn’t actually being progressed at all – it was just on record as being a customer contact. So I asked them to open a case now, which they did, and they told me someone would call me back with a resolution within 12 days at latest (they gave me an exact date, which was somewhat reassuring).
[Narrator voice: But no-one ever called him back.]
Obviously, that date came and went, and no-one had contacted me. I gave it a couple of weeks past the deadline (just busy with a lot of other things going on), and called back again. And at least I had a case number they could look up, this time. “Oh, that case has been closed as ‘unresolvable’”, the Customer Service Rep told me. What? Whaaat‽ I asked when, and the date she gave me less than a week after my last call, and before the deadline they had given me for them to provide feedback. So not only had someone not called me to give me a status update, they’d just closed the case and didn’t even tell me that! Were they not able to contact me? I know they have my number!
At this point I was clearly pissed, and told them I wanted the case reopening and that I wanted someone to call me back within three business days to tell me what was going on and when I could expect my refund. In the hopes of stirring them into action, I threatened that if I didn’t hear back in the next three days, my next call would be to the FCC (Federal Communications Commission). She apologized and said that someone would be in touch.
[Narrator voice: But no-one was in touch.]
A week or so later, unsurprisingly I hadn’t heard a thing. So I took the only option I had left and – as threatened – contacted the FCC. I printed out all my bills, my initial chat transcript, and a log of every contact I’d had with AT&T regarding the issue, and sent it all to them. To make sure it got there, I sent it recorded delivery. This is a federal organization, and I’m sure they’re very busy looking into real issues of national significance, so i didn’t expect to hear anything back for a while – if at all – but what did I have to lose? Well, $759.25 to be exact, but I’d almost given up and written this off by this stage (which is probably what AT&T were counting on).
[Narrator voice: But then something magical happened…]
Delivery tracking showed that my correspondence had been received at the FCC last Thursday. On the Thursday afternoon, I got an email from the FCC confirming that they had registered my complaint against AT&T for “misleading – if not deliberately unethical – business practices, overbilling, and a general antipathy to ‘doing the right thing’” which was apparently how I’d worded it in my letter. Great! They told me they’d sent it on to AT&T who had 30 days to respond. I heard from them in less than 24 hours.
On Friday someone from AT&T’s Corporate office called (and left a voicemail – I don;’t answer calls I don’t recognize the number on – robocall avoidance) to say they had received my info from the FCC, and had credited my account with the full $759.25! So that’s my next 4 months phone bill paid for! Result!
Of coursed, I’d be much happier if I hadn’t had to go to the lengths of getting a Federal commission involved before AT&T bothered to take this seriously (because, really, the FCC should have better things to do with their time). I’d also be happier if the guy from AT&T who called me back had actually apologized, but I guess we can’t have everything.
I did suggest to the FCC that they may want to look a bit more closely into exactly what AT&T is doing here, as there seemed to be some parallels between AT&T opening (and charging for) unnecessary and unrequested group plans, and Wells Fargo opening unnecessary and unrequested savings accounts (for which they were ultimately fined millions of dollars), so maybe we haven’t heard the last of this yet.
In the meantime I’m seriously thinking of jumping from AT&T over to Sprint or maybe T-Mobile. But part of me just wants to sit tight, and make AT&T continue to service me, as I’m sure I’ve been blacklisted now and they would be quite happy to see the back of me. Let’s see if I suddenly start experiencing a bunch of random “no network” black-spots now. But if I do, I’ve always got my new buddies at the FCC to look into it!
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