Aaron Huslage

Since Apple announced the 3G upgrade for its (now) venerable iPhone, I’ve been chomping at the bit to get one. I’m not a line waiter, so I ordered one through AT&T’s National Business Ordering department at the uncommitted price ($399 for the 8GB). I received the phone yesterday and was ready to activate it by the evening.

Since my employer, who pays my phone bill, and I have decided to part ways things have changed with regard to my mobile needs. I decided to activate the phone on my family’s account instead. With any other phone this would not be an issue at all. With iPhone things are different.

I called up what AT&T calls “Customer Care” at about 7pm last night to begin what I thought would be an easy process, after all I had the phone in my hand and it wasn’t configured for any account as of yet. Then things went wonky.

The first thing the agent said was “How did you get this phone?” I told her that I had ordered it via phone on my business account, but that I now needed to add a line and activate it on my family’s consumer account. She said that no one could order a phone and that they all had to be purchased at an AT&T Core store or from Apple. I retorted that I did exactly that and had the phone in my hands. She then asked for the SIM card number, did some things, and the iPhone magically came to life. Then my father looked at his phone and saw “SIM Card not Provisioned. Error: A05″. Not good.

It turns out that the representative had turned the iPhone into my father’s phone. This had the knock-on effect of deactivating my father’s SIM making it useless and leaving him without a phone until he could go to AT&T to get a new one. This would not do, as one could imagine. After making a brick out of both my iPhone and my father’s phone, the representative told us that she couldn’t add a line or activate iPhones. Nice of her to think of this before causing pain to the customer.

We then were transferred to the “Add a Line” department where they informed us that they couldn’t activate an iPhone either. This happed at about 9pm. I gave up.

This morning, I went to the AT&T store here in Redmond to get a new SIM card, which they happily provided. The man at the counter told me he couldn’t activate the iPhone or do anything else on the family’s account, which is based in North Carolina, because it was out of his market. He said I could call customer care and that they could activate the phone instead. This did not bode well for the day’s activation activities.

I came home and got on the phone to customer care once more. I got a person in their Austin call center who was convinced that I had picked up the phone at a retail location. No matter what she was told. This made me laugh with disgust. She transferred me to another person who talked to his supervisor and tried to make good, but he was told that he had to find the source of the order first. He couldn’t figure it out and transferred me yet again to Small Business Care to see if they could sort it out. This is when I met Don Blackmon. After 44 minutes on the phone I had finally found who I thought was my savior.

Don was a fabulous fellow who really did want to treat me with respect and believe what I had to say. He pulled up my order quickly (as quickly as the always slow AT&T systems would allow at least) and listened to my story. He tried to pull up the family’s account, but was hit by the barrier that exists between different disparate systems within AT&T.

He dug and dug through documents and procedures that are on the company’s Intranet to find a way to make it happen. Apparently there are certain things (which were not named) that could have gotten him fired, but actually helping a customer was apparently not one of them. After the digging he finally found a nugget of gold buried in an iPhone 3G provisioning document under a section entitled “Consumer Customer Requesting to Add a Line” that gave another phone number to call. We called.

Don stayed with me as we went through the standard voice prompts of AT&T’s customer care obfuscation mechanism (aka menu system) and were finally connected to a representative. She gave the same spiel as the other consumer representatives I had talked to and told us that I would have to talk to sales to add a line, but that she wasn’t sure that they could activate the iPhone since that had to be done in-store. I told her that I was in Washington and that the account owner, my mother, was in North Carolina and it would be nigh-on impossible for us to be in the same place at the same time to get this done. She went off to talk to someone and Don had to leave to handle other issues.

She came back and told me that sales could add a line, but they weren’t sure that they could activate the iPhone even if I gave them the SIM number. I had to go, since I had been on the phone for 1 hour and 45 minutes and I have an actual life with things to do and blog posts to write about my experiences. She gave me the sales department’s number and wished me luck.

There will be more to this story, I am sure, as I continute to try to activate a phone. Thanks Don Blackmon of AT&T’s Small Business Care department in Joplin, Missouri for doing what you felt was right and taking the time to make the customer happy. He is doing his job very well where others in his company are falling over left and right. Let’s hope his example propagates. More in a bit.

Well well well. It seems that AT&T hasn’t learned anything from the sham that was iPhone 1.0 activation for corporate users. Instead of allowing anyone to switch to the new iPhone 3G, they have decided to impose the über ridiculous 2 year upgrade cycle on everyone. At least they’re equally distributing the pain.

I inquired of friends at the company about how to switch my current Blackberry Curve to the new iPhone. They informed me that since the line I am using was opened just over a month ago, I am not eligible for an upgrade at this time. I’m on a corporate plan with 20 or so lines all sharing the same pool of minutes and every device has unlimited text and data, so we aren’t a tiny customer for them — not huge either, but good solid monthly revenue.

Not only am I ineligible for an upgrade, but they insist that they cannot simply add the iPhone 3G to our existing pool of minutes. Every iPhone must use the iPhone plans. Period. If a small company has an account like ours, that apparently means nothing to AT&T. My friend then suggested that I either open a new line or purchase the iPhone at the noncommitted price of $699 (!). Ridiculous. Again.

Of course the guy blamed Apple for all of this nonsense. Published reports say that AT&T and Apple no longer have a revenue sharing deal and that AT&T just buys the devices outright from Apple. Therefore Apple no longer has a say in the plans or deals that AT&T makes with its customers. Not to mention, Apple has completely ceded the customer’s initial experience with their device.

So in summary, our company gives AT&T a decent amount of recurring revenue and are, in most ways, their ideal customer that delivers very high ARPU month over month…for years. They aren’t willing or able to provide us with a device that we want because of politics and flawed marketing. If I were to open a new line under their new iPhone plans, they would actually be making LESS money from us than if they just added it to the pool. Go figure.

AT&T continues to not value its existing customers in any way. They force us to use devices for two years, regardless of whether the device was purchased on contract or not (mine was brought in and not purchased from AT&T). They are willing to lose money in the name of strange policies and contractual “obligations”. When will they learn that the customer just wants what they want and they should give it to them so that they can preserve their market and improve their reputation?