This is my home on the internet, welcome.
AT&T seems to really be making an effort to improve customer relations, at least if you complain in the right places. Maybe this is nothing new and I’m only just now seeing it, but I want to write about it anyway.
In the past, service in San Luis Obispo, CA has been spotty at best, with the only local tower on the highway that goes through town. There is also a very large population of iPhone users on campus here at Cal Poly. In every single class I’ve had this year, I’ve seen at minimum 6 iPhones, not to mention how many I see walking around campus. I’d probably guess theres a good 2,000 or more iPhone on campus at any one time. Of course, that didn’t help the network load on the cell tower.
One of my friends posted a complaint on AT&T’s Facebook Fan Page yesterday afternoon, and an hour later an AT&T rep responded and said that they were working on coverage in SLO, and a new tower was added to cover the core of the campus. What I was most surprised about was that it wasn’t a generalized statement of “yeah, we added a new cell site that covers campus”, it was very specific and named streets and buildings on campus that were the focus of the new cell site.
I then looked around a little more on the page, and it seemed like this was a completely regular phenomenon, I’ve counted at least 5 different AT&T staff responding to complaints and questions in just the past 20 hours or so, I imagine that there are probably at least another 5-10 monitoring the Facebook Fan Page. And these were not all “we’ll look into the problem”, many of them requested that the customer email them so they can get it resolved quicker and more efficiently, and in at least one instance, the representative called the customer.
I didn’t have as much time to peruse AT&T’s Customer Care Twitter account, but it looks more or less the same, although a little more of delegating the issues to other staff via escalation rather than personally handling it. Then again, it also seems as if it’s one person handling Twitter themselves, so I can completely understand the reasoning.
Let’s just hope that this is a sign that AT&T is getting more serious about their service and customer relations. Here’s to at least one more cell tower going up in SLO!