Customer Contact

AT&T has a wide variety of customer contact. They use mail contact to send bills directly to your home. Internet and on-site technology makes the service process simpler for AT&T and their customers. While on your computer at home, you may access and pay your bill at any time and customize other parts of your service contract. You can also order products from their website. This requires no direct contact with the representatives at AT&T. In some stores, they also have a way to sign in to the service, sales, or technical support departments, so that there is an exact order for the employees to handle customers. Phone contact is also a major part of AT&T's operations. Having access to direct contact with a telephone representative makes it easier for a customer to take care of any issues or concerns without having to leave the comfort of their home. The calls are scripted when you first call, so that they can direct you to the exact department you need. This also makes it easier for the employees to organize and handle large volumes of customers. The most complicated part of AT&T's Customer Service Matrix is the Face-to-Face contact. This contact has tight specs because there is a degree of procedural skills that are required by the service or sales representatives, as opposed to loose specs, which deals with some self-serve services. This is probably the largest and most important part of AT&T's customer contact. Employees need to be trained and have certain skills to deal with a customer appropriately. Much of the customer's experiences depend on this type of contact, so it crucial to the company.

It is mostly the direct contact services that deal with different types of uncertainty. The types of uncertainty include:

- Arrival Variability
- Request Variability
- Capability Variability
- Effort Variability
- Subjective-preference Variability

Each of these variables come into play when dealing with customers, so it is very important for AT&T's employees to be trained, so that they are able to handle each situation appropriately.