How Social Media Allowed AT&T To Keep Me As A Customer

My buddy Rev Andy Stoddard writes on his blog a good bit about social media and the power of properly using it. Today I found out that power. I have a Blackberry Bold 9700. I updated the software to the new blackberry 6.0 and it locked up my phone. When I reverted back to BB 5.0 many keys on my phone ceased working. After trying to fix it I opted for an early upgrade. I went to Turtlecreek mall to visit Mobile Solutions to upgrade to the Samsung Captivate. She called to authorize an early update and was told I'd had too many suspensions of service in the past 6 months. Let's stop here. For those who only know me through this blog not personally, you probably don't know that these past 6 months have been some of the toughest in my life. I march my mother totaled her car and was unable to work until about two weeks ago. Also beginning about January my uncles Leukemia became more aggressive as he continued to fight it with the help of my family mainly my mother despite her accident and subsequent surgery. Despite all this AT&T felt they still couldn't allow me an upgrade despite the circumstances even though my blackberry is only halfway functioning. So what is my response? well besides telling my mother, I take to twitter with and tag all posts related to the event with the ATT hashtag.

 

After that tweet plus one more I got a new follower. AT&T customer care started following me on twitter and I received this message.

After DM'ing ATT my information and the circumstances surrounding this saga, they called me and talked to me. At the end of the day my new Samsung Captivate is in the mail for half of what I was going to pay to upgrade it, my family still is with AT&T, and I'm very thankful that I signed up for that Twitter thing that people said would probably never catch on. Sure it wasn't the Egyptian Revolution but I'm very thankful and I'm sure AT&T  is that they made having a legitimate social presence an important idea. Their social media saved them one customer and allowed me to believe that AT&T does have some people that still care about each individual customer.