In July we up-graded our cellular plan with Cingular Wireless. We had received an offer in the mail which allowed the choice of 2 out of 3 options. The options were 50% more Anytime minutes, 5000 Night and Weekend (N/W) minutes and 5000 Mobile-to-Mobile (M/M) minutes. We had the pamphlet stating the offer with us at the time we signed up for the new contract. We signed up for Family Talk and purchased 4 phones. We chose a plan with 500 Anytime minutes, 5000 N/W and 5000 M/M. Before we left the store we confirmed our plan with the sales clerk.
Later that night, I read through the paperwork from our contract and noticed that it did not mention our Night and Weekend minutes. The next morning I called the store and spoke to a sales person to verify that our plan was correct. The sales person assured me that we would receive 500 Anytime, 5000 N/W and 5000 M/M minutes. I was told to also call Customer Service and confirm that they had the same information. I did. Customer Service also confirmed that we had 500 Anytime, 5000 N/W and 5000 M/M minutes with our new plan.
From the very first bill, we were charged for N/W minutes. I called month after month to have this corrected. We received a credit in November after months of arguing but continued to be billed for the N/W minutes. Every Customer Service representative I spoke with would argue with me for the first half hour until some, not all, would look into the history of our account.
It got to where I would immediately ask for a supervisor because the Customer Service people were never able to issue the credits anyway. They would assure me that a supervisor would be notified and the problem would be fixed. The next month's bill would arrive without any corrections having been made. Of all the phone calls during which I requested a manager, only once was I ever actually transferred to one, and that wasn't until March. To top it off, I was in the car at the time and the manager was actually upset with me because I couldn't spread my 23 page bill out and discuss it with her detail by detail.
With the help of a Cingular store manager, our case was sent to the Office of the President in May.in May, Cingular decided that the plan for which we signed up was not valid at the time we signed up. Shouldn't this have been known when we signed up for the plan??? Personally, I think that knowing the dates during which a sale or promotion is valid is a pretty basic skill. Not exactly rocket science or brain surgery. Certainly, certainly NOT something that should take NEARLY NINE MONTHS for someone from the company to figure out.
Their solution to our problem was to give us credit for UP TO 50% of the N/W charges and allow us to re-rate our plan. The new plan would cost us $10 more per phone per month. I'm sorry, but since we continued to be billed during the 9 months it took Cingular to come up with a reason for our problem, 50% credit didn't seem like a satisfactory solution. Let me say again that we verified our plan details with not one, but three different Cingular Wireless representatives (two different sales people at the store and a Customer Service representative) just so that a situation like this would not happen.
I wrote a letter to the Office of the President telling them so. Their response, besides suspending our phone service, was to tell us that since our contract does not specify N/W minutes, they are not obligated to give us any credit and refused to put our phones back into service. They told me that since we were continually charged for N/W, we should have known that we were not on the correct plan and should have allowed them to change it for us. Not only did they rescind the original 50% credit offer, they reported us to the credit bureau for the unpaid N/W charges. We would STRONGLY, STRONGLY suggest to anyone looking for a cellular company to NOT use Cingular Wireless.
Nancy
Chicago, Illinois
U.S.A.
0 comments