No, Really, This Is My Account!

Again, with the company that is the spawn of Bell, we have another incident of customer abuse and near fraudulent actions.  An acquaintance of mine recently discovered that her cell phone had been disconnected in the middle of a very busy business day.  Once the days’ activities were complete, it was off to the local cell phone store to discover what had happened.  After the usual, ridiculously long wait this person had discovered that her account number had been mixed up with her son’s account number and the bank draft numbers did not match.  Confused, she inquired as to how this could have happened.  After several minutes of a very perplexed look, the customer representative confessed that he did not know what had happened and that she must call the customer service line.

She contacted the customer service line and after an agonizing 25 minutes of being on hold, she then endured another 15 minutes of customer service wit and wisdom until it was finally discovered that her son who was supposed to have been taken off the account a year ago was somehow put in the payer role of this mess.  This was by name only as the credit card on the account belonged to his mother. To make things even more ridiculous, my friend also discovered that her son’s old cell phone number had not been removed from her account and that she has been paying for it. “But wait there’s more”, my friend was then told that she cannot take her son off of the account, he had to do it himself.  Even though my friend’s credit card number is the one that is charged for the accounts, she had no control over it.

After a call to her son, he fixed the account screw up and my friend was once again back in control of her phone account.  But the phone company told her that she would only be refunded 3 months of her son’s (canceled for over a year) account and would have to call a completely different number to get that taken care of.  It is ridiculous that she instructed a company rep during a phone call to customer service that she wanted her son off of the account and was assured that the phone had been removed.  Then to have the whole account convoluted by a mix up somehow in the system and lose the control of the account that she pays for is simply ridiculous.

Is this simply a matter of poor training by the company of its representatives or is the software used to manage the accounts totally fucked up?  In either event, it is troublesome that customers have to give their credit card numbers out and then have them exposed to some of form of ineptitude.  What is more frustrating is the fact that the cell phone stores can handle very little outside of a sales transaction.  In most cases you wait in line for 20 minutes of your life that you will never get back only to find out that they cannot help you at the store, you must call the customer service number instead.  The corporation makes it very difficult to handle these issues perhaps with the hope that people will simply get frustrated and ignore the problem which would certainly be more money in their already stuffed coffers.

I wonder how many credit cards are compromised because of the mix-ups that happen within these systems (believe me this is not the only company guilty of this).  Your data is obviously being mishandled by poorly trained representatives or by corrupted software programs where it could easily be compromised.  The executives of all of the large monopolistic corporations in this country are very indifferent to this situation as they really don’t care.  As far as they are concerned, you can take your business down the street to the only other competitor that there is in your market, and pay the same price for the same shitty, dysfunctional service.  Those so-called competitors actually work with your current company to price and service fix, where there really is no difference between the two of them (kind of like our political parties).

The monopolizing of most of our services, products, and food has left us with few avenues from which we can get customer service and satisfaction.  What my friend went through is probably similar to the problems you have faced yourself with these situations.  It is frustrating, as we have little to no support from offices such as the Attorney General, consumer advocate groups or politicians.  These large multi-billion dollar corporations have hundreds if not thousands of attorneys on retainer and can stall any class action or consumer lawsuits indefinitely.  It will be up to us, the customer, to raise up and fight the bullshit of these oligarch fascists.  Of course, as always—it is just my opinion!

Talk to Ya Later!

The Grumpy Old Fart Customer @2019 All Rights Reserved