So I read through my bill more than once today. To be honest – I still haven’t figured it out completely. This is an incredibly sad state of affairs as I have been reading these things for over 15 years. This is the most confusing one I have ever seen! Makes me sad.
In an effort to understand it better, I attempted to log onto the site. This isn’t the first time I have logged onto the site as I have been able to accomplish a couple of the personalization tasks that had eluded me with other carriers in the past. I started reviewing the bill. I found a link on the site that allowed me to review a copy of the bill. Imagine my shock when what I pulled up looked so much better than what I received in the mail. Huh? Why aren’t the 2 things identical? Shouldn’t they be? Definitely strange.
Stranger yet, while I am noodling around on the site, I am asked to login. All this time I thought I was logged in?!? Guess somewhere in the backend something changed and now I need to login again. Imagine my amazement when trying to use the cell number and password I had used just a bit ago was rejected and I received a funky error.

This is one of the strangest experiences I have ever had with a website in recent years. Basically this message is telling me it doesn’t have a clue who I am, yet just moments before I was reviewing information on my profile? WTF? I read the message. What in the world is ‘Jive’ and why in the world do I want to ‘keep track of team progress’ on a site I use for managing my personal account? Really? I have to admit this is LAME.
So I followed the instructions and created a NEW account. This definitely has me scratching my head because I truly thought I had one.

I checked the email and used the link to do the email validation.
This is where I landed….

My goodness if I am now having to create this account, what happened to the other account?
Fortunately, I know what is going on, but what if I didn’t? How many other consumers out there are totally confused? It makes me ponder how many calls this negative customer experience is driving to call support. Isn’t the promise of ‘self service’ there to help stop calls to support? Personally, I believe a well planned and executed self service experience is a whole lot more pleasurable than calling for assistance, ever.
This little adventure with the site and logging in consumed all of the time I had to spend on this project for the day and derailed my progress in analyzing the remaining 7 pages of the bill that came in the mail on Friday.
…to be continued…