Edgar Cervantes/Android Authority
long story short
- One customer had a frustrating experience while trying to cancel a phone line with AT&T customer support.
- Even if the user explicitly wants to cancel the line, customer support agents continue to offer alternatives.
- Although the cancellation took about five minutes, the ordeal lasted more than an hour.
American consumers must compete with three major carriers: Verizon, AT&T and T-Mobile. Depending on your area and its infrastructure, these options may be further reduced, often leaving you with no choice but to stick with one carrier that works, no matter how frustrating. When you do want to switch or cancel, you’ll find the experience gets worse, as this Reddit user learned the hard way.
Reddit user BudgetPea9967 recounted their recent experience with AT&T. Basically, this Reddit user wanted to cancel a phone line because the person who owned the line was no longer in the country. To do this, they contacted AT&T customer support via chat. What was supposed to be an easy, straightforward 10-minute conversation to clear the line ended up dragging on for over an hour.
We’ll let you browse 24 screenshots of users to better appreciate their frustration during the painful process.
For the TL;DR, customer support representatives constantly offer alternatives to users instead of canceling the line. Options include reducing rates by pausing the line, changing the line number to a new one for free, offering loyalty upgrades, introducing dual SIM cards for hotspots, and more.
It’s painful that the customer doesn’t want any alternative and just wants the line cancelled. Customer support representatives are either stuck in a conversation flowchart loop trying to follow standard operating procedures or trying to achieve certain KPI goals, or the user is chatting with a bot stuck in a conversation flowchart loop. I personally lose patience early in a conversation, so major support users do this better than most of us.
Eventually, the user managed to cancel the line (which ended up taking about five minutes) and even filed a complaint with AT&T about it. However, the user mentioned that they have not received any response to the complaint. Eventually, the user also switched to T-Mobile. Many other users (from different carriers) recounted similar situations when they wanted to cancel their phone lines. The experience is certainly not limited to any one carrier, so choose your best option carefully.
If this happens to you, Reddit user DoAndroidsDrmOfSheep has a helpful tip, suggesting that you port the number for $7 and then cancel the line on the porting service.
Have you had a similar experience canceling a line with your carrier? Let us know in the comments below!