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.

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."

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