Thursday, August 23, 2007

AT&T Looks Stupid On IPhone Bills

Now this is a boneheaded move by AT&T.
When Justine Ezarik, a video blogger in Pittsburgh, saw that a box from AT&T
had been delivered to her doorstep a couple of weeks ago, she thought that
perhaps she had been sent a complimentary accessory for her new iPhone. Instead, she found a 300-page, double-sided, excruciatingly well itemized bill.

This bill is itemized Kilobyte by Kilobyte. So this resulted in massive piles of paper that AT&T will have to eat the cost of shipping for. AT&T had to pay $7.10 just to get this bill to her.

Wasn't there someone in corporate that said "should we send out a 300 page bill in a box for $7.10 to this customer?" Wasn't there some VP that said lets send out summaries and keep the itemized bills online and we'll save a few bucks? A 300 page bill seems like something that would be red flagged for special handling in their automated billing system. There had to be someone at AT&T that called the shipping company and placed 300 pages worth of paper put into a box and sent it out. It was a failure of controls, fallbacks, and thought by upper management. It really speaks ill of AT&T since the rampup of the IPhone was a pretty long process and wasn't just a rush job on short time.

This kind of screwup also makes AT&T look even worse since this is a failure in handling perhaps one of their most lucrative exclusive contracts. It also makes Apple look like crap because they love to push how green their company is. Yeah, they are so green that tons of extra trees were cut down just so they can show page after page of 2KB for $0.00. I guess this is case in point of the danger of providing exclusive contracts.

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