Submitted: 9/8/01
Modified: 9/8/01
In January my fiancee and I leased a new office space for our business. Along with this naturally comes phone lines and other expenses. When the first months bills arrived I automatically paid them without reviewing the contents (it was the height of tax season, guess what we do!?!?)
The second month my job became a little bit more relaxed and I decided to carefully review a very high phone bill. I immediately noticed a strange description with a total amount of $65.00. I immediately called my local phone company to find out what this call was. My local phone Co. Did not recognize the item description and said to call AT&T to find out. As I proceded to do so, I was told by an AT&T representative that this was a conference call. I told her that I had no idea why this would be on our phone bill as we do not have a need for this type of call in our office. The woman sarcastically asked if I need to know the definition of a conference call. Ostensibly this was not going to be a very productive call.
After an arduous period of time the woman agreed to fax the "order" for the conference call and who was on it. When I received the fax I immediately responded back via fax that this was not a call made from our location and/or were we involved in any such call. At this point we were told the matter would be researched. Two days later we were left a message on our machine stating the problem had been discovered, that there was a mix-up between phone numbers and conference call accounts. We were assured that the problem would be corrected and our account credited. Now, I'm sure I do not have to go into explicit detail of every month's battles ever since. Obviously this matter has not been resolved or I probably would not be on this web site writing this report. The best part however is that every month since we have been charged for at least one conference call (ranging from $50.00-$68.00).
I have called this company numerous times and each time I get a different person who has to have the whole thing explained each time and has to research the matter each time. Once I had a "supervisor" Veronica Johnson call our office number and ask for the party who arranges these calls by name and when I said she had the wrong number she hung up, called back and told me she would credit my account for the errouneous calls. She never did!
I also have had AT&T contact us looking for the money for these calls, fuuny thing is they know the name of the company who actually places these calls. Call me crazy but, shouldn't it be easy to fix the error when you know the actual name of the company in question? Here's another funny thing, the last voice mail we were left from AT&T looking for the money for these calls they left us with the company name an ironically enough I did my own detective work and the company in question is simply listed in the phone book, their phone number is one digit off from ours and beleive it or not they are on the same street as we are. If I can access this informaqtion so easily why can't these "trained" representatives of a very large company do it???
Moral of this story-always check your phone bill but, if you find an error expect to be hasseled, threatened, placed in collections but do not expect the error to be corrected without a fight (at least if you have AT&T anyway!!!)
#6579
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