By DAVE HAMRICK
dhamrick@TheCitizenNews.com

AT&T Broadband is promising to do a better job for Fayette County residents.

Company officials last week met with county officials and ironed out an agreement that it's hoped will improve customer service in the county.

And officials are hoping the agreement will end recent problems in which the company has improperly installed new cable lines without permits.

AT&T, which took over ownership of Fayette's cable television franchise early this year, is racing against the clock to upgrade its system here by Nov. 30. More than 800 miles of antiquated coaxial cable is being replaced with state-of-the-art fiber optics.

“We told them we would like to see residents of a subdivision notified prior to commencement of rebuild in that area,” acting County Administrator Chris Cofty told the Fayette County Commission following the meeting.

“And, upon completion of a day's work, they're to go to the end of the line and check the TV picture to be sure the residents are getting service,” Cofty added.

During the system upgrade, customers are experiencing more than the usual number of outages, according to AT&T Broadband spokesman Reg Griffin. And crews sometimes forget to turn the system back on when they finish work, leaving customers without service overnight, or even over weekends, he admitted.

“To a customer, an outage is an outage,” Griffin said. When construction crews are going to be disrupting service, he said, “We try to do the best job we can of communicating that, but generally speaking most folks don't realize it until their favorite show goes off,” he added.

Cofty said the company has agreed to make sure residents are notified with notes on their front doors within a week or so before construction will commence. Earlier notices sent out several weeks before are usually forgotten, he said.

And he hopes the extra system check at the end of each work day will help eliminate prime time outages, cutting back on the number of complaints, Cofty said.

But more than the outages themselves, customers have complained repeatedly to him about lack of follow-up and rude treatment when they do call AT&T, he added.

“To resolve that, they're putting a team together to deal with Fayette county citizens and government,” he said. “There will be one point of contact, and that person will be empowered to resolve the problem.

“We have made too many attempts to resolve issues for citizens of the county and have run into too many dead ends” in the past, said Cofty.

During the meeting with company officials, Cofty said, he stressed that all complaints passed to the company by county staff should receive a response the same day, with no exceptions.

Company officials were given until Friday to come up with a plan to handle customer complaints in Fayette, and the county and company have agreed to work under that plan for three weeks and then reevaluate it, Cofty added.

Griffin said now that AT&T Broadband has bought out MediaOne and Intermedia, the two companies previously serving Fayette, the company is committed to improving its service record here.

One change recently made is that the engineering and customer service functions have been divided among two vice presidents, whereas before they were combined under one, he said.

“There are so many issues to deal with in both those areas, it should work a lot smoother with one person accountable for customer service,” he said.

A team of 150 vice presidents and managers also recently discussed the possibility of dividing the cable company's Atlanta service area into about 25 zones, with an engineering team and a customer service team responsible for each. “That way they know the streets, they know the area and there is greater accountability,” he said, adding that company officials hope to implement that plan by the end of the year.

“Overall, people are going to see a different attitude now that we are AT&T Broadband,” he promised. “There is a higher level of expectations.”

It may take some time for that to trickle down to the person you get on the phone when you call with a complaint, he admitted, “but we are doing everything we can to make sure that's a short period of time.”