AT&T employee reaches out when company lags

AT&T has been taking a little heat lately here at the Gripe Line. The company starred in “True tales of terrible customer service” for refusing to waive nominal late fees when a father fell behind on his bills while his daughter was dying. The company also showed up in “AT&T’s business-class service — or just business-class prices?” — a saga in which Gripe Line reader Ed’s business was wounded by a switch to AT&T’s U-Verse service. I heard from a few people at AT&T in response to all this attention.

Someone in the PR department told me the company is looking into Ed’s situation and will get back to me with more news. While I was waiting, I heard from “DM from Sac,” who asked that I keep his real name out of this because he works at AT&T, though not in the PR department.

[ Read more tales of misguided customer service and find out how tech support is finding a friend in peers. | Frustrated by tech support? Get answers in InfoWorld’s Gripe Line newsletter. ]

“As an employee of AT&T, I frequently try to run interference for Gripe Line readers who experience problems with the company,” he says. “I am sad to say that for a communications company, we often don’t communicate well. That’s truly a shame. I put a lot of faith in my fellow employees, but not very much in the company itself. As a pure profit-making venture, there is not a lot of room high-end customer service.”

DM from Sac was upset by the story of the father who got no sympathy from AT&T when he was grieving for his daughter. He asked me to pass along his condolences — if not from official channels at the company, then from himself and his fellow employees. “On behalf of AT&T employees everywhere, I offer our deepest and most sincere condolences on the loss of your daughter,” he says. “Our thoughts and prayers are with you and your family.”

DM from Sac also had something to offer Ed of the U-Verse service debacle story.

“I am a U-Verse Residential customer,” he writes, “and am very happy with the service.” Like Ed, DM from Sac is using his own router in conjunction with a U-Verse router — the cause of a good part of Ed’s trouble.

“This kind of setup is fairly advanced,” DM explains, “so I would expect that a call to tier-two support would be needed. I ran into the same problem myself where no one seemed to know how to hook everything up — until I found the online forums.”

In the forums, DM from Sac found — and offers — expert help, without spending hours trying to track down the one guy in tech support who knows how to do this.

Thanks, DM from Sac! It’s nice to be reminded that just because the lumbering creature that is a major telecommunications company can’t respond like a human being to the needs of its customers, the individuals within the belly of that beast can. Thanks, too, for the reminder that real people can usually be found in the forums.

Got gripes? Send them to christina_tynan-wood@infoworld.com.

This story, “AT&T employee reaches out when company lags,” was originally published at InfoWorld.com. Read more of Christina Tynan-Wood’s Gripe Line blog at InfoWorld.com.