AT&T – Jim Stafford's BlogOKC

Customer service without the ‘service’

UPDATE: American Airlines responded to this post and has put us back on track to receive a refund for the canceled portion of our daughter’s flight. Customer service lives to see another day! Thank you, American Air.

Call me an entitled American, if you like, but there seems to be a wide gulf these days between the words “customer” and “service” in our society.

I’m talking about when you call the “customer service” line of a major corporation and have to work through 15 AI bots that can’t help with any of your issues before a human finally comes on the line.

And when you finally connect to a human, there’s little help and even less empathy. Try talking to the “loyalty” department at the phone company known as the Death Star.

But I’m not here to rage on AT&T today. I’ll save that for another time.

Today, I’m ranting about a recent experience with the customer service department at American Airlines. Here’s the story:

My daughter, who lives in Florida, flew home for a few days the second week of January. She was to fly out of OKC Will Rogers International Airport at 4 p.m. Saturday on the return trip.

We were planning on taking her to the airport mid-afternoon until … she got a text about noon that her flight to DFW had been canceled. Canceled!

And Sarah had a connecting flight that evening to Fort Lauderdale with a 7 p.m. departure.

My wife and I were about to jump in the car and drive her to Terminal C at DFW when Sarah received yet another text from the airline. She had been rebooked for a Sunday flight — with no input from her.

Things got tense at our house as Sarah told us how important it was to her to get back to Florida on Saturday night. She still had what I assumed to be a valid boarding pass for the 7 p.m. flight.

So, I got on the phone, called the American Airlines customer service line and actually got a human on the line with not much delay. When I told him about our dilemma, he took the flight information from me and said, “oh, she’s been rebooked for tomorrow.”

Yes, I know, but we are driving her down to DFW this afternoon to make the 7 p.m. flight to Fort Lauderdale.

“She won’t be able board that flight because she’s now booked for tomorrow. And the 7 p.m. Fort Lauderdale flight is completely full. anyway.”

We went back and forth for a few minutes, but he was clear that her boarding pass was no longer valid.

So, I hung up and walked back into our living room where I found my daughter talking to another American Airlines customer service person who was far more accommodating. This person told her that she could still use her Fort Lauderdale boarding pass for the 7 p.m. flight, although she might not have the same seat assignment.

Two customer service folks from the same airline with two different outcomes. A rain-on-our-parade from one and a ray of hope from the other.

So, I can’t call out everyone in their customer service department. Sometimes there are unexpected pleasant surprises.

We all piled into the car and headed south, made it to DFW and dropped her off at Terminal C at 5:15. Sarah’s boarding pass DID get her on the plane and she made the 7 p.m. flight without issue.

But then… I got to thinking. Hey, American, how about a little something for the effort? Like a refund for the canceled OKC-DFW portion of the flight.

We were out gas money and time to make the drive to Dallas and back.

The next day, I got back on the American Airlines website, clicked on the “refund” button and filled in our flight numbers. The website told me that we had no canceled flights for which we deserved a refund.

What? I’m assuming the airline decided that we had a boarding pass for the Sunday flight that we didn’t use. So we were owed nothing.

I immediately found the page where you can file a complaint and wrote out this entire scenario in the space provided.

The next day I receive an email with this message:

“Please accept my sincere apologies for the experience you’ve described. We’re committed to prioritizing our customers in everything we do, and your feedback highlights this commitment. Your valuable insights will be made available to our leadership team to explore necessary improvements and deliver the world-class customer experience you expect from us.

“I appreciate your willingness to share your feedback with us. From everyone at American Airlines, thank you for choosing to fly with us. We look forward to the opportunity to welcome you on board again soon.”

Arrgh! The email addressed nothing that I wrote in the complaint form.

American, where’s my #@%$ check? Stay tuned.

Stop the madness of SPAM calls

FCC screen The avalanche started with a phone call from an unknown Oklahoma City number at 8:30 am. The next followed a few minutes later from Denmark, Wisconsin. Then Alex, OK; Luther, OK; Wynnewood, OK; Oklahoma City again (and again); an unknown location; Binger, OK; and on to Colfax, Iowa.

Before the day ended, a total of 17 calls from unknown numbers reached my phone.

But they didn’t reach me.

Monday was just a typical day of robocalls –SPAM calls — from shysters and scammers desperately trying to get me to pick up on the call. They spoof both area codes and local phone numbers to entice people to answer.

Then they either make a gimmicky sales pitch or a false warning of dire consequences if you don’t make a payment IMMEDIATELY.

There are federal laws on the books to allegedly prevent these SPAM calls, but they seem to have ~~little~~ no impact. Consumers can also have their number placed on a no-call list. Good luck with that.

Fortunately, I downloaded an app from AT&T called Call Protect, which directs any call from an unfamiliar number to voicemail. So, my phone doesn’t ring, and I only receive a text notification of the call if I choose to.

I figure if it’s a truly important call, they will leave a voicemail. So, if my air conditioner guy calls, he’ll leave a message and I will call him back ASAP.

voicemail screen

Sometimes, the SPAMMERs do leave voicemails. Typically, it’s the same exact message from a different person. “This is Alexa from the office of the state…” is how most of them start out.

SPAM calls are unrelenting, with waves of them coming in day after day. I’m mostly unbothered by them, but I fear for folks like the elderly who still have landlines or don’t have cell phone call blockers and feel compelled to engage the SPAMMERS when they pick up on a call.

I want to shout “DON’T PICK UP!” to my relatives, but it’s not my decision.

In the meantime, the calls continue to come in, one after another. Obviously, SPAMMING and scamming ~~must be~~ is a lucrative field.

My plea is for the best and brightest programmers out there to create a real solution to halt this problem. Call Protect is a start, but there has to be a real answer.

SPAM calls need to end.

***

Here are some tips I found on the FCC website that might be helpful.

Stips screen

A salute to 1971, the coolest year, from a cool kid wannabe

From the cool year of 1971, a cool kid wannabe peers out from his high school yearbook

I stumbled upon a Wall Street Journal article the other day that outlined what a watershed year 1971 was in many, many ways. (You can read it here with a WSJ subscription.)

It was the year that Nixon/Kissinger reached out to China and opened the U.S. to an important trading partner that had only been seen previously as an arch enemy.

It was the beginning of the end of AT&T’s monopoly of the nation’s telecommunications industry, with an FCC ruling that opened the door to a second long-distance calling provider.

It was the end of the link that tied the U.S. dollar to the value of gold, opening the way to what are known as “floating exchange rates.”

Walt Disney World opened in 1971, as did a little coffee business known as Starbucks, as well as the Nasdaq trading market. The 26th amendment passed that gave 18-year-olds the right to vote. Intel introduced the 4004 chip, considered the first “computer on a chip” and launching a wave of technology innovation that continues today.

The Journal article pointed out that all of these events happened in a single year exactly 50 years ago.

Then it hit me. I graduated high school in 1971, which means I’ve been out of high school for half a century.

The thought almost brought me to tears as I was hit by a wave of nostalgia.

I’m not nostalgic for my high school class, because I never, ever sat at the cool kids table. I was a cool kid wannabe, but never made the cut.

I was mostly invisible to my classmates at Southside High School in Fort Smith, Ark.

So, why did this article hit me so hard? I think it’s because I had never really given any thought to how many years had passed since Graduation Day in 1971.

And how I’ve lived sort of my own version of Forrest Gump’s life in the intervening 50 years, still trying to be one of the cool kids and never quite making it.

But I’m proud of the newspaper career I pursued for more than 30 of those years, a career that brought me to OKC where I would meet the woman who became my wife, the kids we raised, yada, yada, yada.

Enough of that.

Just know that 1971 was a really, really cool year. I’m proud that it’s the year of my high school graduation.

Even if I wasn’t one of the cool kids.

My 2007 test drive with the original iPhone

Steve Jobs holds an original iPhone at the Apple launch event in 2007.

Editor’s note: In honor of Apple’s special product event today, I’m reprinting a column I wrote as technology reporter at The Oklahoman in 2007 after using the original iPhone for a week at the invitation of AT&T. I’ve been an iPhone user now for almost a dozen years. However, in the months after the iPhone debuted in 2007, I had only a lowly flip-phone and some serious iPhone envy.

I was seated prominently in a popular lunch spot along Western Avenue on Monday afternoon talking on the new iPhone that AT&T provided me for a one-week tryout.

I was there to show it off.

Parked at a table in the center of the busy restaurant, I whipped out the shiny new high-tech toy and proceeded to flaunt it for 45 minutes.

Important e-mails were read and sent, using the iPhone’s virtual keyboard that magically appears when any typing is needed. Web sites were accessed, appearing just as they do on a desktop or laptop computer. Tunes were cataloged on the device’s iPod. Photos were taken with the camera phone.

Nobody seemed to notice or even look my way.

Obviously, the crowd was suffering from a serious case of iPhone envy. Their jealousy caused them to look the other way, even as I held it up to input an important appointment on the calendar.

So, I stepped it up a notch and took a very important phone call. I let the telephone ring several times before answering it. Loudly.

People continued their conversations at neighboring tables. I’m sure they were seething because they had no iPhone like the one that was providing me with such child-like wonder.

Meanwhile, I was seething at their ignorance. Or was it apathy?

Of course, they had no way of knowing that the very important phone call I took came from a coworker whom I had asked to call me at that time so I could make a show of taking a very important phone call.

I was engaged in animated conversation on the iPhone for several minutes when I looked around and noticed that the entire section of the restaurant was empty save for me.

I gave up, inserted the phone back into my shirt pocket and quietly walked to the car. Lunch was a bust.

When I walked back into the newsroom, my mood brightened. At least I had a captive audience who couldn’t run when I whipped the iPhone out. I could show off its many great features, from the easy YouTube access right on the main screen to the Google Maps button that let me see a great close-up satellite view of my house.

So, I walked into an editor’s office and pulled it out of my pocket. He was armed only with a Blackberry, which was suddenly relegated to old school technology status. The editor wanted to see the iPhone’s Web browser in action.

We had no WiFi network for the device to automatically find and use, so I called up a page using AT&T’s wireless network. We waited. And waited. Finally, we both had to go back to work.

“I’ll bring it back in when it’s feeling better,” I said, walking out.

On the way back to my desk I passed a co-worker I’ll call “Paul” and sprung the iPhone on him.

Just as I was about to list some bragging points of the device, he reached in his pocket and pulled out … an iPhone.

Paul had had it for a week and never told anyone until that moment. I almost quit on the spot.

Instead, I put the phone away and slinked back to my cubicle. An editor shouted some instructions from her desk.

“Write something about your experiences with the iPhone.”

Oh, great. Well, at least my wife liked the device until I told her about the $600 price tag. She made me put it in a drawer for safekeeping until I could give it back to AT&T.

iPhone, I hardly knew you.