Bills and Service

by Bob Seidel

* Gosh, am I glad I didn't buy an iPhone or another AT&T internet capable phone. If you missed the news, iPhone owners are getting detailed monthly bills that run to 300 pages or more! The problem is this:

AT&T seems to have a strict policy about documenting every cell phone transaction. That means phone calls, text messages, etc. But what does it mean when you access a webpage? Apparently AT&T also considers every webpage access to be a transaction, and duly records it. Making matters worse is that a webpage is often composed of a number of small images and sub-pages - and AT&T again seemed bent to list them all on the monthly bill.

Now you would think that somewhere along the line somebody would have noticed the huge amount of paper pouring out of the printers at their billing plant, and the sharply increased postage fees. This type of thing brings me back to my days at IBM or to events such as you see in Dilbert. Surely at some point in time someone noticed this going on and reported it to his or her supervisor. It started up the chain, and finally gets to a mid-level executive who was too busy decorating his office and admiring his outside view to deal with that kind of issue. In true "shoot the messenger" style, the underling was berated and told that company policy was to document every transaction and to go back and manage the problem.

American business has to do better, just as our local towns have to gear up to meeting the challenges of growth in our area over the next few years. Obviously AT&T was not prepared - we have to do better.

* I didn't get good service from Time Warner recently. I have the TW digital phone service (works great) but I noticed that there were some problems with the caller ID function. Instead of giving the correct caller name, it had started to use generics such as "North Carolina call" and showing "Unknown caller" for local calls even in my 278 exchange. I spent literally an hour on the phone getting bounced around and was promised a call back the next day. No call came, so I called again and finally got someone who apologized (pro forma, of course) and proceeded to tell me that the problem was not with TW, but rather the other phone companies.

Perhaps true, but even so it should be the responsibility of TW to get in touch with those other companies and to make sure that the data exchanged between them was correct. It certainly wasn't my place to do it, although in fact that is exactly what the TW person said to do! He told me to tell everyone who called me, whose caller ID was wrong, to call their phone company and complain.

Another example of poor customer service, and passing the buck. If your customer is having a problem, you have to be pro-active and assume responsibility.

* HP seems to have its act together, at least as far as digital camera service goes. My wife purchased an HP camera late last year that worked faithfully and well until the end of our Beach Week family reunion this year. It then started putting horizontal lines in every photo, but the effect was really interesting. The lines were not black or white, but were the photo data just variably shaded. It was a bit like looking through a reflecting Venetian blind.

I found that there were two types of immediate support I could use. One was via webpage and the other via phone. I elected to use the webpage style, and proceeded to answer the basic questions and wait for a service person. The wait was fairly short and after a minimal amount of diagnostic work, the tech determined that the camera needed to be replaced. Unfortunately at that point (and probably not an HP problem) the session was suddenly disconnected.

Rather than go through that again, I used the phone instead. Again in fairly short order I got a tech and the problem was diagnosed. In a few days we had received a refurb that looked new and a prepaid UPS ticket to ship the old one back. The new one worked perfectly. Case closed and my wife is a very happy camper. I am not sure if the same quality service extends to PCs - we have two HP PCs and neither has failed - but our initial experience was excellent. Keep up the good work HP!

Oh, and happy 25th birthday to the Compact Disc (CD)!

(Bob Seidel is a local computer consultant in the Southport - Oak Island area. You can visit his Website at www.bobseidel.com or e-mail questions or column ideas to him at bsc@bobseidel.com. For specific inquiries, please call Bob Seidel Consulting, LLC at 278-1007.)