February 17, 2004
Cingular buys AT&T Wireless
for nearly $41 billion in cash. For consumers is it the best of both worlds or a looming monopoly?
-
That is highly interesting. We're currently with AT&T and we were seriously considering switching to Cingular. I wonder what this is going to mean for us (after the initial shake out). One thing I will not be doing any time soon is calling for customer support. Looming pink slips is *not* going to make those calls pleasant I suspect.
-
I've been looking to upgrade my phone to a Motorola V400; now that the purchase has been announced, I think I'll hold off, as this means Cingular will have the fabled V600 soon. Yee haw!
-
I would imagine the call centers are the places least likely to be impacted by this. Wouldn't the existing AT&T call centers stay and just become Cingular facilities? I am pretty sure that is what happened with Voicestream was snapped up by T-Mobile (at least here in Albuquerque).
-
They better not get rid of the $10 prepaid wireless cards...
-
Well the article said AT&T was planning on laying off anyway and that the AT&T positions were mostly redundant (granted, it didn't say call centers per se, but it seems like it's a customer buy-out rather than an infrastructure one). On the other hand, they could just mean the muckity mucks. Anyway, I look with interest for developments.
-
Given the call volume they deal in I can't imagine they would try to jam all those calls into existing infrastructure. But, then again, I'm using common sense, which is often lacking in big business.
-
Thinking rationally, I would imagine that Cingular would keep some, if not most, of the customer service in place. However, we're not talking rationally, we're talking about a $41 billion transaction. IgnorantSlut has it right. In light of the problems that AT&T had with implementing a new CRM (customer relationship manager) tool, as well as some poorly timed upgrades, I don't think that many of the engineers from AT&T will be employed. (From mid-October to the beginning of December 2003, AT&T could not create any new GSM accounts. They would still sign people up and start billing, but the service could not be activated. And this was going on during the start of number portability.) I hope that Cingular keeps people on, but I wouldn't count on it. It might be a better business decision to lay off AT&T people and hire new employees in their place -- that way, you control the training from the get-go.