Coyote Blog

ACC Business is apparently a subsidiary of AT&T that provides high speed dedicated data lines (think T1 lines if they still call it that).

Long rambling customer service nightmares are hard to describe in a coherent or engaging manner, so I will mostly avoid it.  The episode began innocently, 6 months ago, with an ACC Business salesman calling us asking if we would like to take advantage of lower pricing.  We said yes, signed off, and that should have been that.  Unfortunately the sales person filed the papers incorrectly internally as a new service, setting us off on a kafka-esque adventure were two accounts were created for the same service and it seemed to be impossible, given ACC's internal systems, to merge the accounts without terminating the physical service in the field.  Every month ACC Business merrily billed us twice for the same service, and threatened immediate extinction if we refused to pay one or the other bill.

After spending over a dozen hours of my personal time on the phone with this company I discovered the ACC Business unwritten customer service rules:

1. No matter how many people told you that the person you are contacting is (finally) the right person, the person you are talking to is NEVER responsible for whatever it will take in their internal systems to fix the mess
2. Any past mistakes made by ACC (e.g. their creating a second account by accident) are actually the customer's mistakes, somehow
3. No matter how much time you spend on the phone with them, all past conversations are forgotten and inaccessible to the person you are talking to and thus require you to start from scratch trying to describe the issue and history to yet another new person.

I turns out there is a whole cottage industry of paid consultants whose entire job is to try to act as an intermediary between customers and ACC Business to fix these kinds of (apparently) frequent SNAFU's.  The very existence of such people should tell you all you need to know.  Such a consultant fixed my problem 2 months ago, I thought.

Until I got a note this morning from their disconnect department, saying in part:

If the information is not received within 2 business days, your request will be cancelled. At that time, you will be required to start the process over by contacting our Customer Care Department.

If you need assistance completing the required information or have any questions, please contact our Customer Care Department at 888-286-2686

Of course, per standard ACC Business procedure, the people at that phone number provided me in the email knew nothing about the email, and disavowed any involvement whatsoever with the disconnect department.  This is roughly equivalent to American Airlines telling you that you need to contact them about your upcoming reservation and then giving you a contact number in the catering department.   ACC Business customer "service" could not give me a direct number for the disconnect team or any way to contact them about this email.  So I called my consultant again and prepared to write them another check.

If there is any other way, any way imaginable, to achieve your goals without involving ACC Business I would highly recommend that alternative.

Postscript:  ACC Business has to be bad to displace my previous awful customer service award winners, which were several dying Yellow Page companies that went to quasi-fraudulent ends to try to avoid stopping my ad and ceasing to bill me.  Seriously, your customer service really has to be bad when your otherwise legal business model has worse customer service than a company resorting to fraud.