AT&T Saves the Trees: Charges $2 To Do It

Most AT&T customers might consider their 30 page plus bills to be amusing, or at worst inconvenient, and as they're printed both sides you can even use them for scrap paper. Blogger Muhammad Saleem, however, got out his calculator and worked out just how many trees would be cut down for iPhone users by the end of 2008. Assuming 10 million units sold, the yearly dead log count will be 74,535 trees per year.

An AT&T employee saw the post and emailed Muhammed with some inside information. The anonymous, and newly hired, customer service rep says that as of August 10th, AT&T has switched to summarized billing instead of listing every single billable item.

Also, paperless billing has always been an option, but AT&T will be switching anyone who changes their call plan onto the online, summarized system automatically, Nice in theory, but but the company will charge you an extra $2 for fully itemized billing, which seems a little unnecessary. Read the whole email below.

Hey, I just saw your post about AT&T’s paper bills being enormous today through a link on Digg.

I actually work for an AT&T call center, and while I’m not defending AT&T, I thought the following should be known:

1. AT&T is aware they are killing a lot of trees and is just starting to prevent it by going to “summary billing”–meaning no more call/data details for every phone on the account, just basic charges. This happens by default for every new customer as of August 10th.

2. We are told to encourage customers to use ATT.com to view their detailed bill online rather than looking at all the specifics on their physical bill. We’re also told to encourage paperless billing altogether; an option offered to customers when they sign up their phone number online. All of this is offered free on their website and is available to them 24 hours a day. There are a few exceptions where they wouldn’t be able to view their latest bill for a while, but I am still new there, so I don’t know all the specific factors that will cause this.

3. Also, any customer that changes their rate plan (which, trust me, is about half the calls I get every day) as of August 10th will automatically be put on the summary billing. They have to actually pay an extra $1.99 per month per line to view their call details now. This is where we are trying to push for the customer to view their bill online in hopes that they eventually just sign up for paperless billing. While this method of charging can be taken as two ways, A) ATT just wants to make an extra buck, or B) ATT really does care about trees and is just trying to sway customers away from viewing their bill on paper, I like to think that they are doing the latter. Though, it’s probably the former. ATT doesn’t have the greatest scruples in the world.

Video still courtesy Justine Ezarik [Tasty Blog Snack]

Mission accomplished: at&t mending its tree-killing ways [Muhammed Saleem via CrunchGear]