AT&T Wireless Customer Service

I had expected the worse with AT&T Customer Service, so when I switched over from Verizon Wireless to AT&T, I held my breath. Turns out that I didn't really have to worry, AT&T had managed to make the process fairly painless.

What I really liked at the beginning was that I was able to do about 99% of the work of porting my phone numbers, picking phones, picking a plan and getting everything set up online without any interaction from a customer service person on the AT&T website. My only complaint in the process was that I would have appreciated a bit more explanation of how the actual phone number porting process worked.

The only time I had to actually speak to someone was when I had to activate the two phones. After that, I did call customer service once again when I received my first bill and they helped me out there too since the first bill I received was over $400 and included about a month and a half of services, the activation fees and the other various taxes and fees. I had figured I'd receive a bill for the partial month of services with the activation fees and then they'd start billing me regularly on the next month since nowhere when you sign up does AT&T say that they are going to roll your first two months of bills together along with your activation fees and everything else. So I had called just to make sure that it was right and it was. I can't fault the person I talked to, but it would have been nice to have something said along the way when I was signing up.

Since the intial startup of my AT&T wireless service, the customer service has been okay. I did have to go into an AT&T store to find out how to get the trackball on my BlackBerry working again and then I had to contact AT&T after my BlackBerry crashed on an upgrade and I needed to reactivate it when I finally got it working. I went into one of the AT&T stores for the trackball issue and I used the online chat for the second. Both were pretty easy and painless.

Considering how much you can take care of online, you don't really need to be bothered with actual customer service representatives all that much unless you have a significant problem. I didn't have any of those, but with the problems that I have had, the representatives have been helpful and gave me the information that I needed.

In the end...

The one thing I can say is that AT&T Customer Service hasn't been as bad as I thought it would be and hasn't been as bad as other customer service that I've had. They have helped me when I've needed it, either online or on the telephone and I haven't had a problem that they haven't been able to solve. My only real complaint is that I wish there had been more disclosure about my first bill.

I like the fact that they have such an extensive website that offers a lot of things that you can do without having to deal with a customer service representative. It makes things easier and saves you from having to call and wait for a representative.

I don't know if AT&T has the best customer service in wireless carriers, but in my mind, it certainly doesn't have the worst.