I went to an AT&T retail store (a company store not simply an authorized reseller) at 5 p.m. yesterday, which was a Sunday, to get a new wireless Broadband card.  The sales person had "training" written on his name badge and he was being helped by the manager.  A few things were really wrong with the sale and there was one thing that was good about the sale. 

  

The good part was the "presentation" of the bag that I left the store with.  It looked like a present and the presentation as you can see on the left was very nice.  That was about it as far as the good side.

     

From a branding perspective, I was very suprised to see that AT&T named their device, "AT&T USBConnect Mercury."  There are not many positive connotations with the word "mercury" these days.  I bought some sushi at the grocery store yesterday, and there was a printed handout that detailed what fish had high levels of mercury, and that these fish should be avoided by women who are pregnant.  Then there is the mercury in dental amalgam, and you get the point. 

From a sales perspective, it got worse.  First, I gave the salesman my Rich @ Hirschinger.com email address to use for their records.  The salesman repeated it back to me as, "rich @ rich @ hirschinger.com."  I very nicely advised him that no email address can have two "@" symbols in it and he replied, "Oh, I don't know need to know about that" and "I'm not very good with computers."  When it came time for me to sign the "terms of use" they asked me to sign the electronic pad.  Well, there was only one paragraph on the pad and that was it.  I asked them to provide the full terms so that I could see what I was signing.  It was a three page document and it took about 10 minutes for them to produce it.  There were the usual details about early termination, this fee, that fee, etc.  Then, since so much time had passed, the electronic pad was now blank, and they had to give me a cell phone to accept the terms of use.  It was a flip phone and the manager said, "it's very old but it works."  The company that sells cell phones uses an old cell phone that is falling apart for customers to use.  I had to hit certain numbers and when I moved the phone from my ear so that I could see the touchpad, the lid closed since the hinges on the phone were no longer working and that ended the call, which had to be restarted.  At the end, the salesman that was training gave me the, "you will receive an electronic phone call to provide feedback on your purchase experience and I need you to please respond to every question with a  "5.".  Thank you."  I can't honestly do that so I will simply not respond to any survey since I don't want the guy to lose his job.

So what is the point of this page?  I really need you to know your stuff when you are speaking with, or presenting to, prospective clients about the DDS.com service.  I know we need more time, and I look forward to that time, but in the meantime all of the cases are designed to help you see what I see.  AT&T clearly does not care about putting knowledgeable people on their sales floor, even if they are just training, they don't seem to care about the user experience with their products (the old cell phone they use), and I question their branding choice (Mercury). 

       

I'm very surprised no one has found the very clear rule that I broke on the check list page.  Below are the rules.  It should take about one minute for one of you to pick it out since it is very blatant.  Also, I would have thought that the other $25 prize would have been claimed by now, too.  Remember all of the tools you can use to see a website and see what search engines see...

        

1. Formatting the text is not necessary if ...
2. Do not change the page title formatting
3. Do not paste text directly from Microsoft Word
4. Do not remove the page title formatting, or stretch or reduce the page title anchors
5. Do not move, stretch or reduce the page content anchors
6. Optimize your images
7. Do not underline words or phrases
8. Learn how to use the keyboard

   

Let me know what you all need from me so that we can provide a great service to the clients from the start so that they have a fantastic first impression (no pun intended)!