EGN NEWS DESK
AT&T introduced on Wednesday that it could begin crediting prospects for web outages and lengthy wait instances, the newest initiative in a yearslong effort to revamp the corporate’s customer support.
Starting Thursday, particular person AT&T prospects and small companies that have a fiber outage of greater than 20 minutes or a wi-fi outage of greater than an hour will mechanically obtain a full-day invoice credit score. Customers who name the corporate’s technical assist line and are placed on maintain for greater than 5 minutes will obtain a $5 Visa present card.
The new coverage is part of a $750 million funding the corporate has made in its customer support over the past 4 years, mentioned Kellyn Smith Kenny, AT&T’s chief advertising and development officer. AT&T prospects can even be capable of examine the standing of their outage on a newly created web site.
The announcement follows a 12 months of high-profile web outages involving AT&T and different firms. Last February, tens of hundreds of AT&T prospects throughout the nation skilled an hourslong outage. In September, Verizon had an outage that affected greater than 100,000 prospects.
The most damaging incident occurred in July when the cybersecurity agency CrowdStrike issued a software program replace that briefly shut down a big portion of the world’s computing programs.
Ms. Kenny mentioned that AT&T outages had not develop into extra widespread in recent times and that they continued to have an effect on a small share of shoppers.
A significant focus of the corporate’s funding in customer support has been automation, together with using synthetic intelligence to deal with customer support, in addition to letting prospects talk with AT&T representatives by messaging apps like iMessage and WhatsApp.
Verizon, for its half, introduced a brand new batch of A.I. customer support instruments final 12 months.
