roskos@csed-47.UUCP (Eric Roskos) (04/02/88)
Here is yet another story of U. S. Sprint problems. Although it is
long and complex, the length and complexity are part of the story, and
it does have a moral. And, I have actually simplified the story a lot;
there was a lot more confused-billing and letter-writing involved than
the hilights I have given here....
About 2 years ago, I moved to Bellevue, Washington, which is served by
GTE (General Telephone). With my initial phone service, I was assigned
AT&T, because equal access was not yet available in that area; so, I
subscribed to U. S. Sprint (which at the time had been recently created
out of its two predecessor companies) by the old dial-up service.
About 6 months later, Equal Access came to the area, and I received a letter
from Sprint (after I'd made my selection of Sprint) telling me how my old
account was being transferred to the new "1+" service; my old account, they
said, would cancelled immediately "to keep someone from fraudulently
misusing it."
Unfortunately, this was not true. Due to the well-known Sprint billing
problems, charges continued to trickle in for calls I'd made many months
before; with careful checking, I found that none were duplicates, although
at one point I got confused and overpaid by about $56 when they failed to
credit my account promptly for the previous month's payments (not the only
time they failed to do so, just the only time I failed to catch it).
These charges all appeared on bills sent directly from Sprint, rather
than through GTE.
At the same time, they began billing me via my regular GTE bill, which, it
said on the bill, "was provided as a service to U. S. Sprint".
Eventually, I moved away from Seattle, and cancelled my GTE account, along
with my Sprint account through GTE (the old account, you'll recall, had
been "automatically cancelled" earlier). GTE sent me a final bill, which
included some Sprint calls, which I paid.
The end result was that I had a $56 credit on my old, very-long-cancelled
account, and a zero balance on my more recently cancelled account. So,
I filled in the "change of address" forms that came with the credit, and
wrote on the bill "please send a check for the credit balance".
They never sent a check for this credit balance. Then, six months after
I'd left the area, GTE sent me a bill with new Sprint charges (for calls
which I apparently had indeed made), along with a note saying that these
were charges that had been newly found due to "improvements" in the billing
process. Now I had a $56 credit and $60 worth of charges, both for the
same telephone number, and I attempted to get this corrected by writing
to both companies -- since GTE was only billing "as a service to Sprint,"
I reasoned, Sprint could just correct this apparent accounting error
themselves. I also sent GTE a check for the correct balance, since I did
owe about $4.00, and since GTE was apparently responsible for collection
of however much I did owe at that point.
But today, I got a call from GTE, requesting that I pay them the $60,
because "the computer" wouldn't let them correct the problem, and Sprint
had (they said) already billed GTE for the money. I would have to pay
GTE, and then get the money back from Sprint myself somehow.
My first reaction was to take some action similar to that which Sprint would
take if it was me who was 6 months delinquent in my payments. But, after
thinking awhile, I decided to call them and try to straighten out the problem
first.
What I found was that Sprint had apparently marked the oldest account as
"cancelled" in response to my most recent letter, and had credited my new
Sprint account here in Alexandria for the balance, leaving GTE with a
charge of $60. So, now if I pay the $60 to GTE, which I will do, when my
next bill comes, everything *should* be corrected (unless they discover
some more "lost" charges), although I have to write a check to cover
Sprint's mis-billing, essentially to perform a transfer of funds from one
of two duplicated accounts to the other, which they allegedly can't do
themselves.
Incidentally, despite all the billing problems, the customer service
representative had an English-language description of the actual action
taken ("Customer requested credit balance be refunded. Balance credited
to new account nnnnnnnn") and who it was done by (an office responsible
for "correspondence") on her display of my account. This was not so bad
if you think about the implementation; at least the software
seems to work.
I had said there was a moral to this story, but after telling it, I see that
there are actually just diffuse morals:
1) the original one: don't trust Sprint to cancel accounts when they are
"supposed" to. Call them up and be sure. In this case, they apparently
left the very-old account active due to their continually-incoming
temporarily-misplaced charges. And, they did have two accounts, rather
than simply transferring the old one to the new equal-access billing, or
even tying them together in any way that they could transfer the credit
on one to the outstanding balance on the other.
2) Sprint's billing continues to have problems. I am really curious how
they could have such serious problems, since charges seem to come in over
six month periods, interleaved from a variety of locations; I can envision
dusty tapes being found under a pile of papers and being sent in to the
central office to be added to the next month's bills (even bills
on accounts that have been cancelled for six months). and
3) It all works out in the end, if you keep after everyone enough. Though
I must admit, it is unfortunate that one must provide one's own efforts
to correct such problems for free, while companies usually have fines and
fees to cover their costs in correcting problems in the opposite direction...
Will I still use Sprint? Well, for awhile. But I guess I'll start looking
at other companies. There is only so long you can continue to be forgiving,
especially when the company's mistakes cause a customer service representative
from the collection office of your (former) local phone company to call you...rbd@NEON.GATECH.EDU (Richard B. Dervan) (04/04/88)
I had exactly the problem described earlier. I finally got US Sprint to transfer the $60 credit balance I had over to my new dial 1 account. It took about 6 phone calls and 4 months, but everything is ok now, or so it seems. Maybe I'll switch to MCI and use Sprint as a secondary carrier by using the carrier access code.... -Richard _________________________________________________________________________ | Richard B Dervan BitNet: ccoprrd@gitvm1 | | Office of Computing Services ARPA : rbd@neon.gatech.edu | | Georgia Institute of Technology CIS : 70365,1012 | | Atlanta, Ga 30332 MCI : RDERVAN | | uucp: ...!{akgua,allegra,hplabs,ihnp4,seismo}!gatech!neon!rbd | |__________________"We don't fit the mold...we build it"__________________|