I have changed or ordered 5 home phone lines in the past 6 months, mostly to take advantage of new pricing bundles. In every case customer service has been polite and knowledgeable about services. But they have never gotten an order right in even 2 tries.

• Custom calling services (caller ID, etc.) ordered as bundles have been billed individually, at twice the bundled rate.
• Line configuration is always different from what I requested. Not just little-misunderstanding different – hugely different. For each of 3 home lines it has taken 4-5 calls to configure them correctly.
• AT&T notified me that my DSL service request had been canceled (turns out they couldn’t deliver it for weeks), then they sent me a modem for the canceled line.
• When I requested another DSL line to replace the canceled one (!), AT&T’s order department phoned later to tell me that the number they had assigned to it was now unavailable. I called CS, and asked the agent to check again. “Oh, wait, this is strange, sir. That number is being held for…. you.”

AT&T has been good about all this, sending me over $150 in refund checks and promising another $200 of discounts and rebates. But it can’t be easy to add lots of new lines with an order system designed by the Keystone Kops.