Everyone I know who has an iPhone experiences drop calls. Some more than others. I am no exception except that I don’t accept dropped calls as normal.
In all fairness, my iPhone 3GS works very well most of the time. Recently I have spent time in California, Toronto, Chicago, Edmonton, Alberta. My home is in Florida. With all of this travel I had very little difficulty with service. My service issues begin when I near my home….within about 100 ft to be more precise. I have several iPhones since 2007 when the first iPhone was released. Since then I have had several periods of weak connectivity but overall I have not had a problem. That changed beginning late last year.
Once it was clear to me that something had changed and my phone was not the problem. I began calling AT&T. I think having to do that should be considered as a terrorist interrogation technique. There have been a couple people in that company I connect with who were very nice to talk to and demonstrated they understood the issue. They also assured me the problem would be fixed. The problem is not fixed. And tech support actually misrepresented the action the took. I was told today that an engineer had been dispatched to my home area and found nothing wrong. No engineer ever showed up and the most that was done was for someone to look at some screen and conclude their towers were operating properly. I never doubted that because a malfunctioning tower would be detected and fixed.
If I heard it once I heard this once I heard this at least 5 times just this week. We apologize, our towers are fine. Please be sure your software is up to date and turn your phone off and on as we sent some data or something to your phone. There is a lot more but the bottom line is, this issue is not resolved and the discussions I had with tech support were totally not helpful.
Business Marketing 101: make sure you invest in retaining the people who are doing business with you now.
Business Problem Solving 101: Variance are solved one person at a time.
Business Relationship Building 101: Almost nobody expects technology or any product for that matter to work perfectly all the time. It is how you handle the problem that determines whether you are building positive or negative goodwill.
My Conclusion About AT&T
1. There are indicators AT&T’s network is inadequate and Apple which is an excellent company will find alternatives.
2. AT&T continues to fuel negative goodwill
3. Markets have a way of compensating for weakness. Look at how many companies that were once huge have or are near closing their doors.
Key Lesson For Those Learning Business Principles: Pay attention to what the losers do and then …don’t do that.
Sending you energy of health, happiness, prosperity
Steve Pohlit
Business Consulting, Executive Coach
Turnaround/Crisis Management
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727-587-7871
About: Steve Pohlit is a CPA,MBA and has been the CFO of several major domestic and international companies. Steve is The Managing Director of Top 1 Coaching/Consulting of The JT Foxx Organization. He is an expert business coach and consultant focused on building massive business profits and net asset value. He is very experienced with Internet marketing and social media marketing. All articles published by Steve unless specifically restricted may be freely published with this resource information.
Hi Steve,
This weekend my iPhone gave up the ghost in that part of it stopped working. Without my iPhone I began to notice how this one product has become so central to people’s lives and free of the phone for a few days and using a spare Nokia handset, I realised how many problems with the phone I had ignored because of how highly regarded it is.
I also experience terrible reception near my home and I have also been onto my network provider who gave me the same run around AT&T gave you, and I know several iPhone users who have reception problems. The problem is not however entirely with the network provider, Apple must also shoulder some of the responsibility for producing and successfully marketing a device with “phone” in the name that is in reality a pretty bad phone as well as closing the network provision to only one company per territory (it’s O2 here in Ireland and I understand Apple did exclusive deals almost everywhere).
Out of my immediate circle of close friends there are four of us who have iPhones. The others use it as their primary computing platform whereas I use a PC as part of my daily routine. For them, the iPhone is the ultimate piece of consumer tech but I’m not convinced and am starting to think that Apple have done an amazing marketing job and managed to get users to blame any shortcomings on their network providers.
It will be interesting to see the iPhone running on other networks – if the connectivity problems aren’t resolved Apple will have some explaining to do.
M.