AT&T Telephone Company Bellsouth Once again AT&T Bellsouth has found a way to screw the consumer!! Atlanta Georgia

AT&T Bellsouth has once again managed to screw the consumer.  What is it with this company?  They are supposed to be a large reputable business, yet they run their operations like a seedy rent by the hour motel.  In other words...don't ask, don't tell.

My husband and I, like many of you, are in a financial situation where budgeting is of the essence.  We decided that even in these tough economic times, we would take a leap of faith and start our own business.  Well, with starting a business comes obvious expenses.  What we didn't expect, but frankly should have, was that AT&T Bellsouth would purposely and knowingly deceive us with their service quote. 

When we established our new business service, we were emailed a quote of expected monthly charges, as well as all these "credits and rewards" for becoming a new business customer.  Well on the quote, all one-time charge activation fees were waived because we agreed to a 36 month contract.   

When our first bill arrived a couple days ago, I was looking over it and saw approximately $150.00 dollars in installation charges.  Of course that threw me for a loop because our $250.00 bill was now $400.00!!

I called AT&T this morning to inquire about the charges and Ms. Cox, the customer service rep, told me that they did waive the activation charges, that is the charge to get a dial tone to your phone.  The installation charges are different and because AT&T Georgia does not communicate this charge to AT&T National, they have no way of adding that amount to the quote they sent us.

What you could not see on the email quote was what was written in the smallest possible font imaginable, in fact my husband printed out the quote and had to squint to make it out...Installation charges vary from state to state. 

Are you kidding me?  This is supposed to be a reputable company.  My question for AT&T is this...Why not just be upfront with the consumer and tell them exactly what they can expect?  Do not try to entice new customers with "credits and rebates" and then fail to mention the massive unexpected installation charges.  Just tell us.

If AT&T had said that the installation was an additional fee that varies by state BUT you can expect about $200 to be added to the bill, then we would have been aware and properly budgeted for the additional cost.  That is all we are asking as consumers...be upfront!  I guarantee AT&T would receive a lot less angry phone calls if they made all charges clear from the start.

This is not the only problem we had with our business service either.  We started our service on August 6th, 2009 but it was a couple days before the tech came out to set up our actual phone line.  In addition to a new 1-800 number (which he was handling) we also signed up for webhosting so that we could have a webpage for our business. 

Well, about 3 weeks into our service, our email went down and we were not able to open our webhosting.  So, I called to see what the problem could be.  I was informed that they had frozen our account because they could not verify the phone number on the account.  They could not verify their own phone number!!  So, instead of contacting us to let us know (they had an alternate number, not to mention the fact that the 1-800 number was fully operational), they just turned off our emailing and webhosting services.  So, for several days, we were unable to get emails and people could not access our webpage. 

We potentially lost business because of an error by AT&T and we got no apologies, no nothing.  This is just the tip of the iceburg of the shady things of which this company is capable. 

They say a business is only as successful as its management.  Well, they really need to consider providing better training for those monkeys they have sitting in the corner offices.  Hmmm...actually this could be taken as an insult to monkeys.  Get it together AT&T!!!