Many months ago I wrote about a surprising charge that showed up on my Verizon phone bill from AT&T. It was a big surprise partly because I was not an AT&T long distance customer. The surprise was made even worse because when I called to ask for a refund on that charge AT&T took an opportunity to first make a series of really obnoxious pitches for me to switch to their service, and then went so far as to lie to me not once, but twice, about my long distance service from Verizon.
It turns out that A LOT of people found similar charges on their bills. 1,267,032 if Dow Jones are to be believed. There were a number of articles that speculated that AT&T made all of these “mistakes” on purpose to circumvent the Do Not Call list, which had just been launched. I don’t know if I give their billing operations that much credit, but conspiracy theories abound.
According to Dow Jones AT&T Corp. (T) will pay $500,000 to the FCC to settle the charges that the company erroneously billed certain AT&T and non-AT&T customers a $3.95 basic rate monthly recurring fee. My two issues with this are that what AT&T charged me was more than $3.95, and others reported similar in the press. Two, AT&T never did refund the erroneous charges on my bill, which I did need to pay because they were on my Verizon bill. AT&T promised a refund and it never came. So Im speculating that even with the size of this fee AT&T likely came away making money from this mistake or scam or whatever you want to call it. Thats just not right.
This morning the Washington Post had this piece on the low-key nature of the AT&T Wireless – Cingular merger. While the piece was a relatively fluffy one (as one comes to expect from the business section of the Post) it did touch on the very interesting issue of branding for the soon-to-be-former AT&T Wireless and their former corporate parent AT&T.
A lot has been going on with these two companies in the last six months or so. AT&T is effectively on the auction block being ready to be bought by Bell South or some other poor bastard, announcing a withdrawal from the consumer market while at the same time putting on an advertising blitz during the Olympics built largely around their consumer VoIP service. And if that, in and of itself were not confusing enough…
AT&T Wireless, which is a completely separate company from AT&T, mind you, had their own advertising blitz during the Olympics. One will recall the “How many bars?” ad with swimmer Michael Phelps. That ad push came on the back of months and months of bad coverage in the press that AT&T claim actually hurt their reputation for having licensed the AT&T Wireless brand to the company AT&T Wireless. Should I just start referring to these companies by their stock ticker symbols (T and AWE) to cut down on the confusion?
It seems Cingular are going to take a slow migration plan with the brand. I actually think this is a mistake. Considering the troubles AT&T Wireless have had I really think this branding exercise should be done like removing a Band-Aid: tear it right off. Cingular should bring in the blokes from Cisco who re-brand the companies their acquire and just completely redo the AT&T Wireless retail locations. They should make a big push to the current AT&T Wireless customers and get all of the service contract plans and features they can into their hands immediately (like roll-over minutes). The new company should use this as an opportunity to tell customers the problems of the past are behind them and engage in some top-notch systems consolidation exercises to truly deliver on that promise.
This posting on Slashdot led me to this article on CIO.com about all of the trouble that happened at AT&T Wireless leading up to their poor experience in the early weeks and months of number portability. It really seems to me to represent an example of a perfect storm of poor executive decision-making.
Amongst the problems at AT&T Wireless that I gathered from the article are:
- The very poor choice of having meetings regarding the potential for outsourcing and off-shoring in very clear sight of employees who were likely to have their positions eliminated in the process. This seems to have been followed-up by shadowing of those same AT&T Wireless employees by employees from the firm to which the jobs would be outsourced.
- Some project management choices that sound very unusual to me. While not bein an IT project manager, the decision to have concurrent workstreams all making changes to code at the same time, such that each group was effectively coding against a moving target seems like a very unusual choice.
- The failure to take into consideration the challenges of the impending wireless number portability and the complications it would create for a new CRM implementation. The sheer volume of customer support calls one could expect at such a point in time should have provided a clarion call that it was probably not the best time to engage in a major IT excercise.
- Choosing a different firm from all of the other major wireless carriers to manage the number portability. According to the CIO article AT&T Wireless had already signed the contract with NeuStar, but considering the enormity of number portability and the fact that EVERY OTHER major carrier chose a different provider seems to be a senseless choice.
- It would be easy to be critical of the back office systems that support AT&T Wireless provisioning and billing, but the current management could hardly be blamed for that. These isssues are actually pretty typical of any telecom operation, and are actually the bane of pretty much the entire industry. They certainly don’t make life easy.
The real shame in all of this, I think, is that one set of very poor choices led to some serious problems with what I thought was a great company. I’m still an AT&T Wireless customer, but I’ve had my own problems with them recently. It’s been clear that they’ve offshored their call centre services without adequate training. It’s no wonder the company has been snatched up by Cingular, and I actually suspect that might be the best thing for their customers at this point. Hopefully a new set of executives will be making the IT decisions in the merged company. Hopefully the integration efforts once the merger is closed go better than the CRM implementation. The sooner this merger happens the better for AT&T Wireless so they can stem the churn. Luckily for the happy couple the competition have been making plenty of noise about how delays in the merger are going to be good for their business, helping to make the case for a speedy approval process for the merger.
