There are a couple reasons they would ask; 1) their system doesn’t have your phone number associated with your account (or it’s associated with more than one account); 2) your old number has been re-assigned to someone else, and they see “Jones” on the screen, when you said your name was “Smith”; 3) because the balance has been transferred to collection, they are trying to gather as much information on you as possible to give it to the collection agent; 4) the CTI was down when you called.
You cannot take for granted what kind of system their service reps use. I don’t work at a utility company, but I do work at a call center (insurance company). And we have to manually input a phone number to pull up an account, and accessing an account is not documented unless the rep physically chooses to document it.
However, all of our calls are recorded. You should be able to get a recording of the original call from them, but you’re not going to get it from a front line csr. Escalate.
Wait wait wait.
Do you not have proof of an electricity bill for that address that you paid after you moved out (the inference being that you could not have paid your final bill until you actually moved out)?
If you offer up proof that you made a payment after you moved out (I mean shit, anything will do - a bank statement, credit card statement, anything showing $X was taken out at some point soonish after you moved out. If you have the same elec. company for a different address, then you’re going to have to reconcile that second payment with a utility bill), and then further tender proof that your lease ended in nov, that’s a pretty hefty mountain of inference that they are going to have to surmount to prove that you do in fact owe them money.
If you don’t have that proof, sorry, I’m going to believe them.
that’s total bullshit.
every time I have ever dealt with an entity on the phone regarding any transaction of consequence, they have been more than pleased to pony up a confirmation number.
there’s no reason to believe that Company X really has any vested interest in doctoring their records so screw Joe Blow Consumer out of 50 bucks, so I generally deem those confirmation numbers as pretty dang reliable.
I’m not really sure what you’re saying here. I cancelled my account at that address. As far as I was concerned, I no longer had any account with them and didn’t owe them any more money. If I had somehow been receiving bills from them after that, it wouldn’t have just been an issue of me paying them - I would have also become aware that they didn’t consider the account closed.
As it is, I didn’t receive any bills and I didn’t make any payents. Everything appeared to be in accordance with the account being closed.
But did you have a zero balance on that October day when you called to cancel the service?
The last bill you received from them would indicate it was the final bill. Let me guess you don’t have it.
Ok, I’ll try to explain better. I’ll make some dates up.
Say my billing cycle for my electric bill runs from the 6th of the month to the next 6th of the month. Say my lease runs from the 15th of the month to the 15th of the month. I am also moving out that day (the 15th).
In all of the places I’ve ever lived at, when I call and cancel the electricity service, they ask me “ok, what date do you want to stop service”. Naturally, I tell them that I want to cancel service the day that I move out (or more likely the next day just to make sure the lights don’t go out when I’m moving out), so I’ll say "the 15th (of November) let’s say.
Ok, all fine and good. On or about the 8th of November, I receive an electric bill charging me for my usage from October 6 to November 6. No problems, I pay it that day.
I pack my shit up and leave. (this is where the forwarding address discussion fits in)
On or about either the 17th of november, or the 8th of december (entirely depends on the billing practice of the utility), I will receive (at my forwarding address, or as has been explained, my prior address that was thence forwarded by the post office) one last bill for the service I consumed from Nov 7-Nov 15.
You should have a record of payment for that bill (if you paid it) somewhere. I would present proof of that payment (which would be for a significantly lower amount than the prior bill you paid, since it’s only for about 1/3 of a month), present a copy of my lease or move-out statement or something that shows you stopped living there on November 15, and give it to them. At that point, it’s pretty hard for them to claim that they didn’t receive service termination instructions from you.
Not receiving that final bill, in my humble opinion, is indication, again only to me, that everything was most assuredly not in accordance with the account being closed.
Okay, I see your point. But the reality is that I rarely dealt with paper bills. I handled my account online or via telephone. I’d access my account, find out what was owed, and pay it electronically.
That doesn’t actually change anything.
Did you or did you not pay a smaller bill after you moved out?
I mean, on the off chance that your electric billing cycle and rental termination date are so close together that the size of the bill wouldn’t indicate much… did you pay a bill after you moved out?
Honestly, I don’t specifically remember. I assume I must have because not paying my bill would have been unusual and I’m pretty sure I would have remembered that. And Central Hudson seems to be confirming this - that aren’t claiming I owe them any money for utilities in October, which was the last month I lived there. So I presumedly made a payment sometime in November for the October services. I didn’t call them in December because as far as I was concerned there wasn’t any bill for November.
I’m not sure you’re ever going to be able to make an inference, let alone prove, what you want to demonstrate. Sounds like you could use a little help in the recordkeeping department.
I would ask them to go back and specifically list out the dates they sent bills (going back into September), their amounts, the dates those bills covered, and the dates they received your payments, and those amounts. Try to build a record and work from there, what turns out to be “not owing them money for utilities in October” could very well have meant “the October bill that was sent out for September’s usage was paid” if you’re being unclear when you ask the question.
But none of that is the issue. I paid all my bills for the time I was living in the apartment. I moved out in October and told them to close the account starting in November (and paid the bill for October). Central Hudson did not close the account and says I owe them from November to March. I’ll readily concede I didn’t pay them anything for those months.
So their records are going to show that I didn’t pay for five months of service - and I didn’t pay. The dispute is over whether or not I should owe any money for those months not whether it was paid.