Date: Tue, 6 Oct 1992 17:38:35 GMT
From: pas@cc.gatech.edu (Paulo Santos)
Newsgroups: comp.dcom.telecom
Subject: Happy With MCI (Was: Unhappy With the AT&T Attitude)
Organization: Georgia Institute of Technology
X-Submissions-To: telecom@eecs.nwu.edu
X-Administrivia-To: telecom-request@eecs.nwu.edu
X-Telecom-Digest: Volume 12, Issue 765, Message 1 of 12

John's story of how AT&T handled a good customer (John himself) who
was having a problem involving Pac*Bell leads to my story of an
average MCI residential customer (myself) having a problem with
Southern Bell.  Only MCI provided a much better service to me than
AT&T did to John.

My residential line has dial-1 service from AT&T.  On Saturday, Oct.
3rd, at about 11:20 p.m., I attempted to place a direct-dialed call
from home [that's (404) 233-xxxx, Atlanta, Georgia] to (407) 846-xxxx
(Kissimmee, Florida) on MCI by dialing the 10222 access code.  I could
not get through, and I was getting a fast busy.  I made many other
attempts, including various combinations of 10xxx-[0|1]-407-xxx-xxxx.
Always the same result.  By then I was pretty sure that Southern Bell
was blocking all 10xxx calls from my exchange to area code 407.  I
tried 10xxx calls to a couple other area codes and got through just
fine.  I tried calling area code 407 on AT&T and it worked too.

So I decided to call Southern Bell and complain.  Their answer was
always that it was a long distance problem, and the most they would do
would be connect me to the long distance operator of my choice.  I
called Southern Bell Repair at 611 and reported the problem, but was
told repeatedly by the repair droid that it was not a Southern Bell
problem.  I knew it was a problem with Southern Bell involving the
tables in (404) 233, but in the middle of a Saturday might there was no
one technically competent to understand it.

As I was getting nowhere with Southern Bell, I decided to give MCI the
opportunity to handle the problem.  I called customer service.  After
explaining the problem, the representative realized that I knew what I
was talking about and connected me to their technical folks in
Atlanta.  The technical person (Peter) three-way called to the
Southern Bell terminal, but obviously there was no answer.  They would
not be open until 8 a.m. on Monday.

At 8:15 Monday morning, an MCI tech (Laurie) called me to find out if
I was still having the problem.  Obviously I was, as Southern Bell
never did anything about it.  She said she would press Southern Bell
to solve it, and left her number and extension.  She kept me informed
of the progress throughout the day.  At 3:50 p.m.  she called to say
that Southern Bell had finally fixed the problem.  It was a
translation problem in the local exchange -- as anticipated.  She
thanked me for notifying MCI of the problem, and invited me to call
her number directly if I ever had any technical problems involving
MCI.

This is what I call great technical service from MCI.  Even though it
was not their problem, they pursued it with Southern Bell and kept me
informed all along.  Kudos for MCI.

At 5:30 p.m., some clueless person from Southern Bell called "We
understand you are experiencing some problem, but we can't understand
what it is.  Would you care to tell us what the problem is?".  Right.


Paulo Santos   Internet: pas@cc.gatech.edu
Georgia Tech, College of Computing   uucp: ...!gatech!cc!pas
Atlanta GA 30332-0280, U.S.A.        Voice: (404) 853-9393


[Moderator's Note: This is precisely the same problem I experienced
with a call to a place in Wisconsin a few months ago. Finally someone
from AT&T had to lean hard on Illinois Bell to get them to do
anything.  He told me frankly that part of his job involved getting
telcos to correct these things as they were discovered, and " ... with
Illinois Bell, they will *always* argue and find reasons not to do
what I tell them ... it would take them less time to fix something
than they spend arguing with me about why it is not their problem ..."
And about the same time, IBT payphones had one rate for calls to Cell
One phones and another rate (cheaper!) to Ameritech phones. That also
got fixed after asking several times.  PAT]