The Buck Stops Here: Inside AT&T's Tier 2 Tech Support

by kliq

A recent 2600 article, "How AT&T Data Plans Work (and How to Make Them Stop Working)," inspired me to document my time as a Tier 2 Tech Rep for AT&T Mobility.

In the customer service world, Tier 2 tech support is the highest phone support available.

Statistically, your chances of getting a college graduate and/or someone who understands the network are extremely low.  The majority of Tier 2 reps are generic customer support reps that are moved to a specialty department due to outsourcing.  They are given five days of tech support training and then sent to begin taking your calls.

At the beginning of training, they are given a brief overview on how a wireless network works, but aren't expected to comprehend or retain the information.  AT&T doesn't want to pay them to understand how phones communicate with the network, but just to learn the process of basic troubleshooting steps and how to file a ticket for the engineering team to investigate in the local area.

To put it simply, a background in technology is not required to troubleshoot one of the largest wireless networks in the country.

With the combination of systems I was given access to (a more refined coverage map and an Orwellian-sounding program called Snooper that identifies what portions of the network the customer is connected to), I've seen first-hand how truly awful AT&T's network can be.

Of course, your personal experiences may vary, but from my eye in the sky, the only places the network consistently worked for 3G-intensive phones (read: iPhone) were bigger cities out west that had the infrastructure without the population density of the east coast.

Live in a rural area? 3G coverage is thin, if it exists at all.  Live in an urban area?  The congestion is so bad that I saw NYC iPhone users whose call histories were seemingly infinite lists of "Network Congestion" errors from Snooper.

As tech reps, we were given periodic updates from the president of AT&T Mobility, Ralph de la Vega, about how much money AT&T was spending on "upgrading" the network for places like NYC and San Francisco, without ever acknowledging fault for a lack of infrastructure to support the products we were supposed to be selling.

Despite the lack of training, one would assume that all information regarding both phones and the network would be listed within some sort of database for the tech rep to research.

This system is called MyCSP, and the information was often incomplete, out of date, or completely missing regarding technical issues.  The information regarding billing issues, however, was often updated and very robust.

If you were to follow the "decision flow" (a series of Q&As that are used to narrow down a phone's issue) on the iPhone, for example, it would offer to check signal bars, power cycle, soft reset, or change SIM cards.

Users familiar with iPhones have known all along that the signal strength on the phone is wildly inaccurate, a fact that Apple finally acknowledged with the release of iOS 4.

Nowhere in MyCSP did it show the rep how to perform an iPhone field test, which gives the most accurate signal reading, by pressing *3001#12345#* from the dial pad.

Curiously, Apple removed this feature from the iPhone 4, so the actual signal levels you are now receiving is a complete mystery.  When customers called in frequently due to reception issues with their iPhone, I would always ask if anyone had performed a field test and the answer was "no" 100% of the time.

The lack of information is not limited simply to Tier 2 reps.  I often worked tickets, meaning I reviewed work that had been done in the field and contacted the customer to see if the issues were persisting.

I'd get a lot of tickets rejected by the engineering team for "lack of information" when in fact all the information required was submitted with the ticket.  If the engineers in the field routinely rejected network tickets due to a lack of reading comprehension or due to a misunderstanding of how the network works was left unanswered.  I was always told by supervisors to rephrase what was written and resubmit the ticket.

Meanwhile, the customer's service was still out.

Finally, to gauge performance of our jobs, our calls were periodically graded.

Whether the issue was fixed or not was often an afterthought (I suspect the graders didn't know that much about how the network worked, either) but how the information was presented determined if a call passed or failed.

For example, did the rep say the customer's name enough?  Did they sell them something?  Did they mention that the customer has an upgrade available, so that they can buy another phone that doesn't work?

Despite the fact that the department was called technical support, there was a lot of pressure to sell as many features as possible.  The suits looked at each interaction, no matter what the issue, as a sales opportunity.

Keep all this in mind the next time your service goes out, but please note I won't be there to take the call.