When Some Services Do Not Keep Up With Technology

Moving from one location to another forces you to deal with moving services.

Most of us have been there. You are moving from one location to another and you have to move your various services as well. You phone, internet connection, cable, power, water and trash which should cover just about all of them. I am sure there are a few others that I am forgetting and you can correct me for those that I have missed. In today's world of continually evolving technology, we would all hope that most of the service providers have taken advantage of the technology to make their world and yours easier when you make a move. Unfortunately, things do not always go according to plan.

I was recently talking with someone who had move from one house to another. While the move was only about 10 miles, there is always something which can go wrong. Murphy's law comes to mind. If something can go wrong, it will go wrong. If you move to a brand new house which has never had services, that makes the move far more difficult. But when you move to a location which already had all the services in existence, you expect the turn on of services to be a snap.

With technology, so much can be done remotely so that you do not have to sit at home waiting for someone to show up. For things like cable hook up, they still want someone to physically be there because they come out to the home. But with all the changes over the years at the phone companies, they can do something in a remote location to turn things on and often do not have to even show up at your house. Unfortunately, things still happen and in the related story, AT&T turned on of phone services did not go as planned.

My friend had to be a home between 8:00 AM and 8:00 PM which is the window they would be turning on services. Not sure why he had to be there since they were turning on the service from a remote location. So, he sat there expecting to have someone knock at the door or the phone to ring proving that things were ho0ked up and working. No one knocked on the door and the phone never rang. Given that he has a cell phone, they could have called him as well to let him know the status of the turn on.

So, the next day, he called AT&T to check in and get another time when they would show up. He also wanted to know why he had not been contacted. AT&T checked the line and said it was working correctly. They checked it while he was on the phone and they said it just keeps on ringing. That is strange because he has an answering machine attached to it. And there was someone at home when they tested it. Quite obviously, they ho0ked up the number but they had no idea as to where is might be ringing.

In this day and age of technology, it makes one wonder why they cannot take advantage of email, texting or actually calling someone to tell them their phone is hooked up and working. At that moment, the person would be able to pick up the phone to verify they had a dial tone. In this case there was no dial tone. It would seem that a decision to leverage technology to improve customer service seems to have been ignored. Given the high proliferation of cell phones, that provides a great way to communicate with the customer.

The specifics of this problem may be unique, but the method of making sure to communicate with the customer are often common. I have had to call Comcast over the years and it is rare that I get a phone call from them letting me know they will be late. I have had some good experiences with them as well where they do call and want to come over early.

Given the size of AT&T and all the technology they have at their disposal, you would think that communication with customers would improve. The idea of sitting at home with no communication from them regarding what is going on is not a good use of technology. Even worse is the idea of having to sit at home from 8:00 AM to 8:00 PM and not get any service.

While I would like to hope this is a rare occurrence, I am sure that many of you can provide far more stories and experiences with having services hooked up where the simple use of existing technology would have made the process far easier.