I have, for years, been an AT&T Wireless customer. For the most part, AT&T has provided great service and, with few exceptions, has shown they are a company that understands how to engender loyalty from their customers. However, over the last two days, I have had to seriously question continuing to use them as a company.
I received an email from AT&T letting me know that there was potential fraud detected on my account. What made this disconcerting was that the fraud in question had occurred over two weeks beforehand. While I appreciate when a company gives me a heads-up about suspicious activity on my account (American Express does this better than anyone), when they alert me that there was potential fraud over two weeks ago, it does not engender loyalty. Why wouldn’t they have contacted me immediately?
There are only two explanations. One is they didn’t know about the possible fraud until the time they notified me. The second is they had no system in place to alert me at the time the potential fraud occurred. Either way, this is extremely disappointing from a customer service standpoint. Further exacerbating the situation was the lack of knowledge of the customer service representatives I spoke with. In my first call with them, the rep was so uninformed and acted so unprofessionally that I determined I was likely not talking to AT&T but a scammer instead, and so I terminated the call. When I called back the next day, using direct phone numbers to ensure I was in fact talking with AT&T, I learned that the person I had been speaking to was in fact an AT&T rep. It is shocking to me that someone in the area of resolving potential fraud issues would be so uninformed and act in such a suspicious manner.
Even worse, the resolution team from AT&T could not tell me any specifics about the event. They couldn’t tell me if the issue came from my cell phone or when I had accessed my AT&T account using my computer. As I had been in Washington, D.C., at the time, was it possible I had been the target of some skimming, phishing attempt while I was there? AT&T didn’t know. They had no useful information to assist me in resolving my issue. They just knew that “something” had occurred and suggested I wipe my phone and restart from scratch.
I understand that there are bad things that happen that are no one’s fault. It is not AT&T’s fault I had a potential fraud issue on my account. But if you offer a service and do not communicate with your customers on a timely basis, if you have support personnel who cause customers to hang up on them as probable scammers, if you have none of the critical information that your customers need to resolve an issue, then you are set up perfectly to discourage loyalty.
Recheck the critical elements of your fraud prevention and customer issue mitigation, and ensure that your customers are delighted with the fact that you are properly watching the store and reacting appropriately and professionally when an issue arises.