Our AT&T horror story.

We setup a nationwide listing with AT&T Advertising Solutions to direct traffic to our website.  The rep that sold us our agreement has since disappeared from the grid.  We have not heard anything from her and every attempt to contact her has failed.  This includes at the number she provided us (her PERSONAL number within AT&T), email she provided us (again, her PERSONAL email within AT&T), and calling the general phone number and asking for her.  We have been in contact with other AT&T reps, however, these reps can’t seem to figure out how to get us in contact with our sales rep or even her manager.

We have tried for MONTHS to get in touch with a manager or a supervisor that can help us work out an agreement for the services they are FAILING to render.  All of these attempts have failed, MISERABLY, with each and every rep telling us they will contact us as soon as they get a hold of someone or find our original contact.  We have spoken to at least 6 people and have not heard back from a single one of them.

Sure enough after not paying the bill for 2 months the collections division was more than happy to give us a call and ask what was going on, we had them take a look at our account and the countless notes from reps that never tried to get communication from a manager or someone qualified to work with us.   The collections official even confirmed that it was an unacceptable act and “opened a claim” this was weeks ago.  Again, haven’t heard anything back from this person either.  We have even sent polite letters back to the company in the provided prepaid billing envelope and heard nothing still.

The advertising presented to us had extremely good traffic ratings and they assured us over and over that these numbers were real (provided from a qualified outside party) and we could expect to see well over this amount traffic.  (Something around 60000 plus visitors per month visiting our website based off of 5 key words).  Keep in mind this is AT&T providing qualified leads, not conversions to customers, simply click-throughs.   The actual results were less than poor, not even .1%, yes, POINT ONE PERCENT, of the traffic we were quoted on.   When we contacted them asking why we are not receiving what we signed an agreement for they simply say they “don’t understand why it’s not working”.   Then proceed to NOT offer any helpful insight on what they can do to fix their own services!

They continue to bill us for services that they are failing to render and this is bull!   They won’t make an attempt to provide us with a useful contact that can help work our case and all attempts at contacting a manager ourselves have been unsuccessful.  We have left (polite) voicemail as well as emails to several managers none of which even made an attempt to contact us back regarding our services.

We are in a $30,000 agreement with AT&T Advertising solutions and they won’t even communicate with us.

$30,000 is more than most Americans make in a year.

All we’re asking of AT&T is to void the contract and null any existing balance, their services are fraud and reps are paid to keep it covered up.

On a side note.  Along side the poor performance of the ad and poor service after the sale, the ad is also incomplete and we are now 7 months into a 12 month contract. We have also received more calls from telemarketers than we have potential customers by a ratio of 99:1.

We advise you stay away from AT&T Advertising Solutions (yellowpages and yellowpages online) and find an alternative if you want to save a lot of money, time, hassle, and headaches.  This company is simply too disorganized and inefficient to be effective.

Update: 12/24/10

We received a call today from our original manager, we were able to successfully speak with them about the listing and have been able to make progress in making the situation right.

Update: 16/24/10

AT&T has resolved our complaint and we no longer have a binding contract or balance with them.  We are proud to say that once you get past the customer level of AT&T’s service they are a strong company looking to make any customers happy.

At this point we have nothing bad to say about AT&T, they have done what we feel is required to make the situation right and we are pleased.