Unlike Amazon, AT&T seems intent on treating their customers as poorly as possible. Their cell phone service was mediocre ever since we signed up, but it began to progressively worsen and eventually became so bad that people couldn’t hear anything we said. Our conversations were spent yelling into the phone (which was pressed tightly to the side of our face), “Can you hear me?”

The manager of the AT&T Wireless store where they were purchased was unwilling (he claimed he was unable) to do anything to help us. Then, to add to our dismay we discovered that they’re phasing out the TDMA network (which is what our phones use), in favor of the GSM network.

We pleaded with several AT&T service representatives both on the phone and in person to simply let us cancel our contract (they wanted something like $200 to cancel). That’s all we asked. We had already paid them for the phones and for our monthly service, we just wanted to stop having to pay them for such poor coverage. They refused to do anything. In fact I was told by one kind gentleman that they had no guarantee about the quality of their service, and even if they had but a single tower in the whole United States, they were fulfilling their service agreement. We sent a letter of complaint to their national office, but that had no effect. In the end, we remain stuck until the contracts run out.

After doing some research, I learned that AT&T is pretty much the worst company you could hope to deal with. They participated in price gouging after the hurricanes in Florida and on PlanetFeedback they’re tied for the lowest rating (a D on a scale of A through D). It’s no surprise that their customers are hanging up.

Update: Contacting the folks at Get Gephardt was the best thing I could have done to resolve this situation. A day after I sent an e-mail to explain my predicament I got a response from a producer at KUTV. They said I had a valid complaint and contacted AT&T Wireless. Two days after that, we got a call from a very pleasant and helpful person at AT&T Wireless who let us cancel our service without any early-termination fees. She also resolved another issue in minutes, an issue which I had called about two times previously without getting any helpful response.

The lesson I learned from this is that they are capable of providing quality customer service, they just needed a kick in the pants from a TV show that would give them bad publicity.

One final thanks to the team at Get Gephardt. Your help was invaluable and empowering. Thank you.