AT&T's customer service push

AT&T says it is investing $500 million this year to “significantly improve customer experience” across all network services.

At SuperComm 2003, AT&T Chairman and CEO David Dorman Tuesday morning announced AT&T’s spending and service plans.

The crux of AT&T’s plan is to better automate its sales, provisioning and trouble ticketing services for all of its services. These initiatives are expected to reduce costs and precious man-hours devoted to manually handling these tasks.

Many of the services announced Tuesday are already available, but had not been publicly announced before.

The carrier is planning to start a wireless remote access service via Wi-Fi wireless hotspots throughout the world. Customers would get software for their wireless PCs to access the Internet at these hotspots without having to pay a fee to someone at the site. Customers could then link to their corporate offices. The service is analogous to AT&T's dial-up Internet access and dialer software.

The service will be offered through AT&T's wireless affiliate Cometa Networks as well as at least one other partner in Europe.

This service will be available by the end of summer.

Also with unnamed affiliates, AT&T will offer wireless access to data services using GPRS and CDMA technologies as available. The company plans to roll out the access this summer in Japan and the United Kingdom, with four other countries in Europe and Asia to be named later.

The company would issue software to grant mobile computers access to the network with an AT&T dialer that would tell whether the customers were in a service area.

Dorman also promised that by 2005, AT&T would complete its global Multiprotocol Label Switching (MPLS) backbone and push IP access to it directly to customer sites. Customers will be able to buy IP services or to stick with legacy frame relay, ATM and TDM services. These legacy services would be converted to IP at the edge of AT&T's network.

AT&T would not say whose network edge gear it will use nor the customer site gear it will use in offering managed IP services.

To make dealing with AT&T easier for businesses, the provider plans to issue a Master Services Agreement, an ordering template that lists all AT&T services. Customers would go through it and cross out the ones they don't want, and the rest would constitute a service agreement.

AT&T says that customers that agree to use the master agreement can save time and money by reducing negotiating time and the expense of hiring lawyers to negotiate for them.

The company also formally announced AT&T Business Direct and Electronic Bonding, services it has offered in some cases for more than a year.

These services have tools for customers to order, provision and file trouble tickets online and to monitor the status of outage repairs.

Electronic Bonding allows customers to manage their network services through an XML interface or via HTTPS or e-mail. The provider is also offering Business Direct Map, a graphical interface that draws customer sites on a map and allows customers to monitor real-time network activity by clicking on sites.