13 July 2011

Meet my new telephone and listen to a good customer service story

This is my new telephone, the HTC Inspire.


It's 4.8 inches tall, 2.7 inches wide and it's only .46 inches thick. It's also packed with more features than I'd hoped for. Its 8 megapixel camera has face recognition, autofocus and flash. Similarly, its 720pi video camera also has a flash should the need arise. Its screen feels really huge to me at 4.3 inches diagonally.


Because its a Droid phone it does all manner of things that an iPhone can't or won't. Simple things like seeing Flash websites. Also, it has a removable and replaceable battery. Short of another software hijacking, I expect to have this phone for a good long time.


And oh, the call clarity is fantastic.

A big difference between this phone and an iPhone is that it doesn't have visual voicemail, a feature I'm going to miss. However, my need for some guidance in setting up my new voicemail yesterday brought me face to face with AT&T technical help department and it had a happier ending than I was expecting to say the lease.

I called AT&T and was connected with an amiable guy named Larry. I explained the situation, he explained why I was having trouble and I thought that was going to be that.

Just as I was concluding the call, Larry asked me to wait a minute. He wanted to see if he could save me some money.

Larry went through my 10-year calling history with AT&T, crunched some numbers and reconfigured my calling plan so that my phone will will drop by $25 every month. A $25 monthly savings along with my grandfathered-in unlimited data plan and all of my 3,000+ rollover minutes.

Now that's customer service!

9 comments:

  1. To replace visual voicemail, you could try Google Voice. You'd have to start giving people the GV number, but you'd be able to select any message you wanted to hear, skip forward and back, and have them emailed to you with transcriptions (albeit not terribly accurate transcriptions...).

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  2. I've been using Google Voice since it was released and I did put it on my phone for use when I'm in a wifi zone, but I don't want to port my number over to GV full-time. I love having Google Voice and I sing its praises all the time, I'm just not ready to make the full leap yet.

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  3. I also use Google Voice and recommend it. On the customer service end of the post, WOW! It is fantastic to see that someone actually understands that customer service is supposed to help the customer. Hats off to Larry!

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  4. Glad you're loving your new phone. It's nice to hear a good customer service story, too! You don't hear of that very often. Thanks for sharing.

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  5. At least once a day, I hear myself saying inside my own head "I love my phone!"

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  6. Paul, you dont have to port your number to use google voice as visual voicemail. Download the app from the market and go in and follow the settings. Google can do an end run around your curent voicemail and take your messages No need to port

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  7. I already do that. But my Google Voice number isn't a local number and I want to keep a local one too. So it's regular voicemail for regular phone number and Google Voice for my exotic phone number.

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  8. Now that's impressive customer service! Bravo, Larry!

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Talk to me!