AT&T and other companies pushing yearly tech support charge

Updated November 2012:

Some people have initiated a call to AT&T internet or email support, computer hardware companies such as Dell or HP, or responded to an ad on the internet while searching for help with a computer problem, and were eventually lured into agreeing to purchase a yearly tech support plan costing several hundreds of dollars. Often the “tech”/telemarketer is luring uninformed computer users into the large fee by telling them that their computer has severe problems that require immediate attention, when in fact there are minor or no problems at all.

We’ve had several clients report that they’ve called AT&T for internet or email tech support issues, and if they weren’t able to immediately fix their problem they were transferred to AT&T ConnecTech – a $180 yearly service (billed monthly) where a representative can remote control a computer to troubleshoot issues.

The drawbacks of the service are:

• The representative’s technical know-how is sometimes misguided. Several times we’ve been called to fix a problem which their representative has made worse or misdiagnosed.

• Representatives are usually located in India and other foreign countries, have heavy foreign accents or speak in a language which is hard to understand.

• Calls with inexperienced agents in which there is a language barrier can take hours to troubleshoot. We’ve had several clients mention they’ve spent up to 4 hours on the phone only to get seemingly nowhere to resolving the problem.

Our recommendation when calling AT&T for tech support issues is to refuse to be transferred to their for-pay support. Computer Techs provides honest, local support. We can resolve computer issues quickly, either on-site or remotely, often for much less than the other companies yearly fee.