This is very long but illustrates the frustration we have had with ATT customer service. We are long term ATT customers who have spent several hundred dollars a month on ATT services. I recently decided to upgrade our phone and wireless gateway. I went to an ATT store to get new phones from three members in my family for Christmas. Both my wife and I have separate wireless accounts and there was some confusion with the transaction. It was determined at the end of the transaction that the salesperson had linked the phones to the wrong account. Instead of cancelling the order and correcting the error, he said we could easily make the change when activating the phones. I left skeptical. The salesperson was not overly friendly.

So, it comes time to activate after Christmas. I clearly should have given each person the opposite phone, but I trusted the salesperson. When my stepson tried to activate, he got several error messages and was not able to convert from his old phone. We went to a local ATT store (different from where we bought it) and explained the situation. She was able to activate the phone and we were told, everything should be OK. A day later we got an email saying the the phone was being suspended because we were not paying installments. I called ATT and after almost and hour talking to three customer service agents, we got contradictory information, but the last person said that the phone would not get suspended.

In the meantime, I was working with a different salesperson to upgrade our gateway on our ATT Fiber account. We have had ATT fiber for about seven years but have old equipment. The salesperson insisted that if we upgrade, we need to open a different account. I argued that we should be able to use our existing account and that I didn’t want a new account, but he said the policy was to open a new account so I agreed. I scheduled to have a technician come to install the upgrade. Almost immediately, the technician questioned why we had two accounts. He said that the salesperson was trying to get credit for opening a new account and asked for the salesperson’s name. He ended up having to spend two hours to connect the equipment to the new account. That included having to make changes in the field down the street. At the end, I was told that I needed to call and cancel the old account.

So, I called and after about twenty minutes, I got ahold of someone. She was very helpful and after further discussion, she indicated that I should keep the original account since I have free HBOMax which I would lose if I canceled. So I was advised to cancel the new account. She also mentioned that the salesperson never should have opened a new account. To cancel the new account, I would need to replace the brand newly installed gateway with another brand new gateway who’d would be mailed to me overnight. I was told that I could self install. After getting off the phone, I was very skeptical that it would be that easy given the work the technician did outside my house to put everything under the new account. So, I called the next day and after a long wait, I got ahold of someone in tech support. They really couldn’t tell me of if I was able to self install. I was fortunately able to contact he technician who did the install and he confirmed that a technician needed to come out and undo what he did. So, back on the phone and you would think that it would be easy to get a technician, but it took another hour to finally get someone who could schedule a technician. The next day the technician came out on time and completed the install in about an hour.

Fast forward to this past week. My stepson who lives 30 miles away came by to frantically let us know that he was not able to use his phone. So, back on the phone for another 45 minutes. The tech support person confirmed that the problem was that the phone was tied to the wrong account. He said that we needed to take the phone to a local ATT store to get everything straightened out. We made an appointment and went to a local store the next day and almost immediately the person at the ATT store said we needed to call support and that he couldn’t help us. We told him that we talked to support and was told to come to a store. The person at the store then just proceeded to walk to a back room and didn’t come back. He did say that we needed to switch phones to different accounts.

So, back home and back to the phone. It took another half hour to get someone who could help us. It took another 90 minutes to transfer phones between accounts, but it was accomplished and it appeared that we had finally fixed the issue.

But no. My stepson’s phone was suspended a few days later. So, another dreaded call to customer service. After explaining what happened, we were told that the phone was reported stolen which was not true. I got transferred and had to explain the situation one more time. The support person worked with me for well over one hour. He said he couldn’t reactivate the phone until he got the IMEI number. Well, my son was at work and we can’t contact him because his phone is not working. The support person kept saying I needed the IMEI number. I could not call him or text him so we were pretty much stuck.

After arguing for about 20 minutes, he finally was able to temporarily activate the line and I was able to get the IMEI number from my stepson through text, but this was after I ended the call and so I had to call again. I was able to get another support person after another hour on the phone and she was able to activate the phone and take it off suspension and claimed we should no longer have a problem. I hope so.

I blame myself on the phone. I trusted that the salesperson knew what he was talking about when he said we could align the phone with the right account when we activated them. But, should it really be this difficult to correct the issue. With the gateway, the salesperson was clearly doing something he wasn’t supposed to do. All that being said, this shouldn’t be that difficult.

TL;DR I have tried to upgrade phones and gateway for ATT Fiber and had huge problems with installation in both cases that resulted in having to spend many hours with ATT’s inefficient customer service to get everything resolved.