About a month ago, I was extremely shocked to receive a letter from a collections agency on behalf of Qwest. Now, I haven’t done business with Qwest for over a year now. It was actually about a year exactly since I had closed my account with them, and moved away. I had been using their DSL and landline service. It was around $100, so I don’t know how I could have overlooked this.
I promptly call Qwest’s customer service number, as listed on the collections notice. This gets me to some sort of internal collections group, which is bad, because they’re really not interested in service of any kind.
So, I call up, a little distraught (ok, more than a little, but remaining calm since it seems to be an error). The CSR looks up the acct with great difficulty. It takes her several minutes to find me in there, apparently since I have multiple accounts. I don’t know why – it was just one service.
The CSR tells me it was for Internet that wasn’t paid. I explained that I paid for, and shut off, the Internet and landline together. She said it wasn’t shut off and I would have to pay the collection agency. Nuh-uh. Transfer me to a supervisor.
I try to explain to the supervisor the situation. She treats me like a complete criminal and says I have to pay. I ask her to at least look at the account because I’m sure there must be an error here. She does. We spend about a half hour while she looks at the account and can’t figure out what’s going on. She gives me some totally different story that when I closed the account, my balance was on two accounts, and they had credited my payment against one account, and then sent me a refund check that wasn’t owed. I explain I don’t remember receiving any check. She says that it was cashed. I say fine, send me a cancelled check and I can send you a check if you can remove this from collections. She says no, it was issued a final bill in August 2005. That was when I closed my acct. I say, no, I sent a payment to my bill, you didn’t notify me after that time. We go back and forth – she won’t even enter the dispute while the payments arrive until I tell her that I had made a good faith effort to pay and that it was illegal to not dispute a collections amount until verified.
Well, this blessed supervisor hangs up on me in the middle of all this. She says it was an accident when I finally get her voice mail on my cell phone several HOURS later, after I had to call back and wait on hold while some poor CSR looked all over for her. Apparently she went to lunch, right after we got disconnected. Funny, that. She promises to send the documents.
Several weeks later, no documents arrive. I call the supervisor’s direct number about 5 times, leaving voice mails over the span of two weeks. No response.
Fine. I file with the BBB, hoping this will get their attention.
I get a call back in response to my complaint from a young lady, Lisa. Lisa is quite rude to me from the start. She explains that I am in collections and have to pay because – she “thinks” – it was because I was late at one point and my payment was applied to some separate account that got spawned through some technical reason I don’t understand. She says that there is nothing she can do to help me clear up the credit because I received a final bill in March 2005. Notice how the final bill’s date has changed? After several times she promises to call back with confirmation, I finally reach her. She says all that she can do is verify that the amount is correct, and there’s nothing else that she can do to help me clear it.
I get pretty angry. I explain that I have talked to several other individuals with completely different stories, and nobody can pin why exactly I owe, but I keep getting treated like a deadbeat. Nobody ever apologizes for the misinformation, the unfulfilled promises, the general lack of service. I ask how I was notified considering the CSR I spoke to in August when closing the acct never mentioned this balance, and nobody can even figure out consistently why it’s owed! She said “I’m sorry, but you have to call the collections agency and there’s nothing else I can do.”
I start to get pretty upset. I don’t want my credit ruined, so I try calling the collections agency. They of course pressure me for a payment. I want a physical address so I can mail them an offer to pay in full in exchange for a delete. I am verbally accosted by the man I talked to, who at first promises to help me in any way I need if I pay right now (yeah right) and, once I say what I need in writing, refuses, says my credit is ruined, and laughs meanly, “You’re in collections, what did you think would happen?” I rather snippishly say that this was an error, but I’m just interested in paying to clear it. If they’re not willing to deal, I’ll have to deal with Qwest. He says “if you can dispute it, that’s what you should do, then. If you could dispute it, you wouldn’t call us.”
I end up just hanging up on him. I guess it was stupid to even try that route.
Fine. I receive the e-mail with the summary from the BBB complaint, now saying it’s for wireless charges. I write back saying that I have never had wireless with Qwest. She writes back, oh yes, it was for internet service. I can see you totally have it together, there, lady. They also falsified the BBB complaint, saying that callbacks were done well before their initial callback with me and that “I had made no return contact”. I write a dispute to this, not like it’s going to matter, since the BBB is pretty toothless.
It was here, in my frustration and anger, that I forge a clever plan.
I had received the email address of Lisa.Lastname@qwest.com. I think to myself, hmmm. Here’s the list of the executive board on their website. I work in customer service myself and I know that the odds that you can resolve something are directly proportional to the rank of the person you deal with.
I decide to e-mail everyone that I can, bcc’ing the CEO and many other members of Qwest’s staff, including Lisa’s manager, about how unhappy I am that the company keeps insisting I pay for something that they can’t even agree why it’s owed, and about the whole experience in general.
I get an e-mail the next day from the CEO himself, saying he’s passing this on to one of his experts. Spiffy.
Within a few hours I get a voice mail from someone else in the Qwest main office, who is starting an investigation because he, too, can’t figure out why I owe. This was last Thursday. He seemed very nice.
He leaves me another message this morning (I’m hard to reach during business hours!) – I don’t owe anything at all! He thanks me for my persistence, and sincerely apologizes for the problem.
He’s going to take care of everything, and withdraw the account from collections.
It turns out I was being double billed. A second account had been spawned by a CSR and had been billing me for dial-in service (which I never used).
I feel like e-mailing Lisa just to say “I told you so!” Or maybe I’ll write her manager, and tell him exactly what I think about the whole experience.
As glad I am that this is resolved, I think I’ll withhold judgement until I see my credit report over the next year and make sure it never shows up.
I’m glad I stuck to my guns.
