Sample the Web

Friday before this past Friday, I returned home from a friend’s birthday party and was browsing around online before bed. I found a forum on AT&T where several people noted that they’d upgraded to 2.0 with no problem whatsoever even though they were first-generation iPhone owners who had originally signed up on AT&T’s no contract GoPhone plan. This is the same plan that I’d signed up on, so I thought “cool, it’s friday night and time for bed. I’ll update now.” So I did.

The next morning when I woke up, iTunes greated me with a “Click here to get started activating your iPhone” message. I clicked through, put in my cell number and ended up at a screen telling me that AT&T had determined that my iPhone could not be activated with the account I currently have and that I would need to call their 1-800 number to rectify the problem.

Saturday, I called and spoke to one representative who asked if she could put me on hold. I said sure. She then seemed to put the phone down without actually hitting the hold button, so I got to hear her chatting with her friend about some guy she liked for about 12 minutes as I was sitting there going “HELLO?! CAN YOU HEAR ME?” into the phone before finally calling back. When I called back, I got the *same* representative and pointed out how I heard her entire conversation and how I’d like to actually be helped this time around. She was immediately apologetic, looked into it, said she would have to contact another department for help and that they would call me back later that day. I never received a phone call.

Sunday, I thought I’d try to fix it myself. First thing I did was check to see if it was something wrong with the iPhone itself. I took Kristin’s iPhone and swapped out our SIM cards. I had to activate my iPhone with her SIM card in it, but after I did so, it worked fine. All my data was correctly there and working and I could make calls on her account. So, clearly, it was not a problem with the phone, but a simple toggle somewhere on AT&T’s end that prevented me from re-activating my SIM card in my iPhone. I switched the SIM cards back and tried to re-activate my iPhone with no luck.

Monday, I called again. A very nice representative who had absolutely no idea what she was doing heard me say “iPhone” and said she was going to transfer me to Apple Technical Support. I pointed out that iTunes clearly said to call AT&T at this 1-800 number so they should have a solution there and that I didn’t think it was an Apple issue. She ignored me and forwarded my call on to Apple Tech Support. I was on hold for over 2 hours. Once I got on the phone with an Apple Tech, he immediately and correctly noted that it was an AT&T issue, I pointed out that they had just forwarded me to him, and he stayed on the line as he reconnected me to AT&T and explained to them that it was in fact their issue. They then were able to route me to someone else on the AT&T end who was a manager familiar with the iPhone and some problems like this and they took down my phone number to call back later. Total time waiting and on the phone: 3 hours and 11 minutes and I think only about 11 of that was actual non-hold time.

This person was good to his word. He called back. He had me try to re-register the same way I did when I first signed up for AT&T but it didn’t work, as it wouldn’t take the fake SS# of 999-99-9999 (which was how you could originally trick iTunes into letting you sign up for a GoPhone account off-contract). He had me try a few other things which also didn’t work and said he would call me back later that day. End of the day on Monday, someone else called me back to tell me that he was going to be out of the office on Tuesday, but that he would call me back on Wednesday.

On Tuesday, another rep called to tell me they were still looking into it and that I’d receive a call back on Wednesday.

On Wednesday, nobody called, I was using a clamshell Nokia phone that I’d borrowed from Eliot for actual phone calls (so the SIM card worked fine in every phone but the iPhone and the iPhone worked fine with any SIM card other than mine), and I’d basically given up. I had accepted the fact that AT&T was going to be unable to help me at all and that I was just going to have to activate, jailbreak, and unlock my iPhone once the iPhone Dev Team released their new Pwnage 2.0 Tool (which they just released yesterday).

Thursday, I received another courtesy call from AT&T saying that they hadn’t forgotten about me and that they had their “top tech support” people working on it.

Friday morning, I got a voicemail from the same representative who had been helpful on Monday saying that he’d found a solution and that he needed the serial number off of my iPhone. I called AT&T hoping to track down this same representative. I managed somehow to get the same representative on the phone who was extremely nice, albeit clueless, that I’d talked to originally on Monday. She looked at the notes in my ticket and said that she knew everyone who worked in her division and she knew for a fact that the two people who had made the most recent notes on my account were not in her division and she said she was going to transfer me to tech support. I said, quite clearly, don’t transfer me to Apple Tech Support. This is an AT&T issue and I was speaking to AT&T people on Monday. She said okay and then proceeded to transfer me to Apple Tech Support. Complete and total incompetence.

Once I got an Apple rep on the line (after over an hour on hold), I explained to him the situation, he noted that he feels sorry for the AT&T reps who do this all the time, and then he shepherded me back to AT&T and stayed on the line as I began speaking with a different account manager at AT&T who could actually understand the notes she was reading and noted the names of all the people who had helped me over the course of the past week. I told her exactly who was totally incompetent and who was helpful. The guy who had the solution was named Brian. She took my number down and my email and was going to contact Brian for me and CC me on an email to him.

Brian called. He took down the serial number off of my iPhone, said he’d call me right back, called me right back, had me connect my iPhone to iTunes, and, voila, it automatically activated with no problems. Brian said that once he found the one person who knew how to fix this problem, it took all of 5 minutes to resolve and that AT&T is giving me a $20 credit for my trouble. Evidently, 4 other people were suffering from the same problem, but I was the first one to report it.

So AT&T customer support had some HUGE failures over the course of this week, but, at the same time, they had some very diligent people, like Brian, who were doing their best to resolve my problem.

What could AT&T do better?
1. Listen to your customers.
2. Don’t condition your call center people to automatically forward to Apple any questions having to do with the iPhone.
3. Talk to Apple and find out all the instances where “Please call AT&T Customer Support” will appear in iTunes, identify all the problems that can occur, find the one person who knows how to fix it, and spread that knowledge around to your entire team. Don’t let one guy be the only person who knows how to fix these problems.
4. Fire the gossiping non-helpful person who took my call on Saturday.
5. Give Brian a raise and have him train his peers in how to deal with these sorts of issues.

Brian, if you trip across this blog, thanks for your help with this. It was honestly a race between AT&T and the iPhone Dev Team as to who was going to get my phone back online and, thanks to your diligence, AT&T beat the hackers by 2 days. Not too shabby for a large, lumbering company who cannot see its toes for its belly.

//rant off

Now, as far as what it was like to be without my iPhone for a week: it was horrible. Absolutely, positively, horrible. My iPhone has become an integral part of my daily communications and not having it made me 25% less efficient. I couldn’t check email immediately while standing in line doing nothing. Instead, I just had to sit there and do nothing. Horrible. Absolutely, horrible.

Now that I have a fully functioning iPhone with 2.0 on it, I’m definitely digging some of these programs. I’ll write more on that later, I’m sure.