I am so glad to see I'm not alone in this.
Started this nightmare off with a call from AT&T offices in Ohio (I'm in MI). One of those "I'll be in your area on such and such a date, can we meet?" When we met with the sales rep, we listened to her pitch. Itsounded good. Essentially we wouldn't be paying for any calls that didn't generate new patients—basically we had nothing to lose by signing up, she assured us. We then remembered an old friend of ours here in town works in AT&T advertising. We didn't want to take foodoff his table, so I gave her his card and she said she'd check with thelocal office's supervisor to see if she was allowed to take the accountor not. She came back and assured us it was okay, so we signed up withthe assurance that we would not be stuck paying for wrong numbers, telemarketers, people looking for jobs, robocalls, calls after hours, etc. We would receive daily reports of any calls that were made to the tracking number and we could simply call and dispute the charges. Easy, right?
Immediately we started getting the aforementioned types of calls and the reports started flowing into my email. We got less than a half dozen legitimate calls (and I'm stretching here) and only one client out of them all. I was successful in disputing a few of them at first, but then I just couldn'tafford to sit on hold forever and wait for someone in customer service to get to my call. I'm the office manager, front desk person, assistantto my husband... I do everything in this office. I can't afford to sit on hold for 20 minutes (at least) every time I call.
The few instances I could actually dedicate some time to calling, I got nowhere. The service reps would give me the third degree as to why I had waited so long to call, questioned the legitimacy of my dispute, etc. They even told me to ask callers what number they were dialing and to call me back on our regular office number. How unprofessional would that be?! As someone else said, it takes 12 seconds to answer the phone correctly, much less find out what number the caller dialed. Only one woman was very understanding and told me she'd investigate and call me back within a week. I never heard from her.
Atthis point the assigned number had been cut off so I didn't have to worry about the actual calls anymore. Then the billing calls started. Ikept trying to tell them how I had tried to dispute calls, but again, got nowhere with them. Of course, due to complaints similar to mine, they said they had implemented new ways to lessen the amount of non-legitimate calls but they couldn't/wouldn't do anything, like credit my account, retroactively. I offered to pay them $39 for the one client that resulted from this program. They weren't too happy with that offer.
I'm now in collections for $1448.00. Oh, and the sales rep? We heard amonth later from our friend that she had, in fact, stolen the account from him and he had to go to the union about it.
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