When ATT makes me scream

My current employer has a deal with ATT whereby (technically) I get a discount on my monthly wireless bill.  To sign up you click on a few web links, enter your cell phone information and work email address and ATT sends you a verification email. You go through the verification process - a few more clicks - and you are done. Except that you are not!

Three months after I first signed up, the discount had not yet been applied to my account. So, I called up ATT to figure this out. The customer service rep told me that it can take up to 3 months for the discount to be applied. And, that I should be seeing the discount soon. But, she wouldn't give me a date starting when the discount would be visible on my bill. Further, she said that the discount would not be applicable retroactively from the date that I signed up.

In this day and age, for a technologically advanced company in the developed world to not be able to make a simple database entry and recalculate a bill in 3 months seems off-the-charts. It is even more bizarre for the consumer to directly pay, in terms of lost discounts, for the company's inefficiency.

Perhaps I should have expected the above - practically all phone companies in the US are similarly inefficient and disorganized. However, what threw me off was the speed and efficiency of the initial discount sign-up process. It took me less than 30 minutes to find the appropriate information on my employer's website, signup at ATT and go through the employment verification process. So subconciously, I was expecting to see an immediate reflection of the discount on my bill in the next billing cycle (if not on the same day).

In other words, by being efficient with the sign-up process and inefficient with the discount-application process, ATT managed to mislead me. I.e. I was primed to expect speed from ATT but then dumped into the slow lane. To make for a more consistent user experience [sic], perhaps ATT should revert to a mail in discount application that takes 2 months. 3 months to actually apply the discount to an account won't look so bad then.