Finally, An App For This? But Will It Help Us Help AT&T Make Things Right?

Under growing pressure to do something about the horrible service that users like me get to deal with, AT&T and Apple have released an iPhone App to try to work things out.

It’s called “AT&T Mark The Spot” – and when you experience a dropped call, or less than adequate voice quality, you are supposed to launch the App and, “Mark The Spot”.

I wonder if it will be smart enough to remember the spot to report later in the event the service is so bad it can’t connect to notify them? I’m also sure that they have built in signal strength recording so that they can negate false positives.

The difficulty is that there are so many upset AT&T clients that there will likely be many who, even when things are great, will mark everything just to thumb it back at AT&T. Negating false positives may naturally happen if the audience truly adopts the App and continues to use the App, otherwise, AT&T will be dealing with a glob of spotty data.

AT&T is apparently going to be using this data to determine where and how quickly they need to invest in new technology to cover these areas.

In 1997 we implemented a map mashup technology of sorts which lit up geographic hot-spots when people called into Terminix to report possible termite infestations. It was far before Google Maps API and way before the term, “social swarm” stat gathering ever existed. And it showed, in real time, where infestations were happening, and we drove geographically targeted direct mail campaigns off of the data as well.

Anyhow, I think AT&T would benefit from a similar map. If they really intend to “fix things”, I want to know, and see things being resolved.

I envision a map at first that simply shows the US and red dots. As report frequency continues I’d like to see the red dots turn into lakes (these would likely only be seen when zooming in pretty tight).

As issues were corrected, people who reported dead zones would receive a reply text asking them if it’s convenient to re-visit the spot to see if the issue has truly been resolved.

If so, “Turn That Red Dot Green!”

And now, over time, things start getting better.

It’ll never happen because Verizon would use it against them, but how great would it be for customers to see AT&T being somewhat transparent with this?

I mean, wouldn’t it be amazing if we as customers, who have literally been left in the dark, would be able to see these deadzones in real time?

I have to tell you, the world would be a better place if I had good solid connectivity with my iPhone and I’m sure you’d agree.

What do you think? Will you use the app? Leave your comments below.

Best,
John

PS.  The only thing that would not be great if they resolved my trouble areas is that I couldn’t randomly hang up on people and blame AT&T.