Copyright 2007-2011 JessicaMah.com. Theme by Cory Watilo.

Filed under: AT&T

Blogging about company complaints actually helps!

I love speaking out about companies who've done wrong. I've done it with companies such as Serverbeach and Comcast, and plenty more. I'd say about 50% of the time, I receive a response from the company. When I hear from a company official, there's a 99% chance that my issue will be resolved and that my service will either be reimbursed and/or improved. Here's a list of my top three examples of companies doing the RIGHT thing to satisfy their customers:

So lets take bad service company #1: Serverbeach.

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On the morning of October 20th, my ServerBeach services went offline. The reasons are beyond me and irrelevant to this topic. The company had a service level agreement that promised reimbursement for my services if there was any downtime. I blogged about my complaints, and I received an email from company officials within an hour. Since then, the company has provided me over $100 in reimbursement and my servers have stayed online since. I'll call this success and forgive ServerBeach for that mishap.

Lets make bad service company #2 Comcast.

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Just a few days ago, my comcast service was shut off. The service has always been buggy, and their customer support was slow and non-existent at super late hours. Of course, I blogged about it. Within 24 hours, a company official contacted me to help address the situation. A customer rep called, my service was put back online, and my co-founder (who's using this comcast service) claims that our cable speeds have gone way up! I'll call this too a success. Yet again, it shouldn't take my bitching to fix the problems.

Last, but not least, I'll give my final award to Jajah.

Back in December, I was trying to make an outgoing call to my mom when all of a sudden my Jajah service cut off. Ended up that my account was out of funds, so I tried to make payment with a new credit card. It didn't work, so I blogged about it. Within two hours of posting my complaint, the director of marketing gave me access to a company account and fixed the issue by the next morning. Talk about good customer support! Why can't all companies be this good?

I've wrote negative reviews about plenty of other companies who never got back to me. Take for example United - I blogged about them a few days ago and no company representative has contacted me. I complain about AT&T quite often and they're yet to make me happy for the hours of my time they've wasted. I once wrote about how oDesk is better than Elance, but amazingly enough, Elance company officials invited me to their office for (beer) and pizza! It was surprising, yet amazing. Again, why can't all companies be that way?

I'm sure there are plenty of other companies I can add to this list. But for now, the three I mentioned deserve some praise for actually taking care of customer complaints.

Jessica Mah is a 17 year old entrepreneur, blogger, and sophomore in college. She's currently the founder of a startup, managing editor at Startupism.com, and Jessicamah.com. In her free time, she enjoys the prospect of being an underage angel investor while partying like a rock star.

ATT should jump off a cliff...

Some people thought there wasn't another way to hate AT&T more than we already do... well, AT&T did it again. I have an iPhone, as you probably know. I love my iPhone. I love my Apple products, but I despise AT&T for their terrible service, stupid customer service reps, and now this problem:

In a nutshell, they disabled my internet. I'm paying for unlimited internet, yet throughout the day, I've been being charged as if I didn't have that plan. In order words, my iPhone automatically billed me for over $50 today for internet related charges only. According to the customer rep I'm speaking to now, this problem happened to everybody with an iPhone. This is just a terrible excuse from a terrible company, and I'm going to blog about it. If they wanted to avoid bad word of mouth from this, they would offer every iPhone customer with a free month of internet or something among those lines.

My two cents: Avoid AT&T! Tell everybody you know how terrible they are!

Jessica Mah is a 17 year old entrepreneur, blogger, and sophomore in college. She's currently the founder of a startup, managing editor at Startupism.com, and Jessicamah.com. In her free time, she enjoys the prospect of being an underage angel investor while partying like a rock star.

ATT Helping the Community? Yea Right!

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AT&T made the fake and *smart* move to allow everyone in Southern California free Wi-Fi access. Kieran Nolan, AT&T vice president and general manager wants to help the community during this rough time and recovery. If for whatever reason you don't know, Southern Cali was affected by pretty bad fires.

Everybody hates AT&T, including three unnamed employees I've spoken to who work there. The obvious thing to do is for me to question their true motives behind offering free Wi-Fi to SoCal. First off, their brand image has been terrible in the recent years. They gobbled up Cingular (which for some reason, people liked better) and decided to drop the name in favor of AT&T. There's been a management change, logo change, marketing attitude change, and it seems to be working... sorta.

AT&T gets a new logo. PayPal recently changed the graphics on their website too. Why? To help eliminate the bad rap associated with their old (and current) brand. Notice the change in graphic and shift to lowercase letters...

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Then the move to work with Apple's iPhone. All of a sudden, AT&T is associated with iPhone. iPhone = Cool, AT&T = Still lame.

Recently, AT&T started posting up internet ads and city billboards advertising how their cell service works in more places than before. Notice the advertisement I saw on Gizmodo the other day:

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Fail. And now, they're trying to be nice by offering SoCal residents free Wi-Fi. Does it make them look like a kind and caring company? To be honest, to me, it came off as being a fake way to gain more loyal customers for when things settled down and Wi-Fi costs money again.

I'll give these AT&T people some credit. The change in branding is good. The change in management still sucks, but better than before. The agreement with Apple was brilliant. The advertisement campaign was a pathetic attempt to look like a cool, young, hip company. The decision to allow SoCal residents free Wi-Fi was also a smart move.

All in all, AT&T is improving. Their numbers are up. (probably because of the Apple agreement) However, I still thing they have a lot they need to improve on. Inner-company efficiency is terrible. Their branding still looks lame. I'll continue to critique them until they get it right.

Jessica Mah is a 17 year old entrepreneur, blogger, and sophomore in college. She's currently the founder of a startup, managing editor at Startupism.com, SimonsRockers.com, and Jessicamah.com.

I want ATT now because it works in more places like Newbosumbus. Not.

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I've been an AT&T customer since the iPhone came out and I despise them. The support sucks, the service sucks, and the company sucks. My connections from AT&T are basically living versions of Dilbert.

AT&T decided to be dumber than they already are. They recently created the above advertisement - I've seen it on quite a few websites and even on billboards in San Francisco. What a huge waste of time and money. I mean, who the hell makes up a city with a terrible name to advertise their product? Why would I want to pay for bad cell phone service if their advertising staff is drooling enough to decide that this is a great idea?

There's much more at stake than wasting time and money. Bad advertising is destroying the brand. eBay screwed up with their windorphins ad campaign. Ask.com also had meaningless billboards and TV ads that didn't get anybody to use the search engine. At the Searchnomics conference, everybody was coming up to the Ask.com employees, asking them why they had such dumb forms of marketing. Point being, this is a botched attempt to make AT&T look like a "fun" company.

If you see any of these ads on the highway, please let me know!

[Credit to Drew Levin for his collaboration] Jessica Mah is a 17 year old entrepreneur, blogger, and sophomore in college. She's currently the founder of a startup, managing editor at Startupism.com, SimonsRockers.com, and Jessicamah.com.