Comments on: Cellphone wrangling

By: Roy Nathanson

Roy Nathanson — Mon, 29 Aug 2022 11:35:10 +0000

Most banks offer the ability to see your subscriptions and to block payment of them via your bank. This can be done on the bank’s website.

When the payment doesn’t go through, you will get some notifications from the service that you need to update your payment information. Decline to do so.

Even if you still want the service, but want to modify it, now you are in the driver’s seat.

By: Ann in L.A.

Ann in L.A. — Sat, 27 Aug 2022 19:46:16 +0000

Cell phone customer service seems to be downright malevolent.

By: neo

neo — Sat, 27 Aug 2022 18:04:04 +0000

Gringo:

Fast speech is definitely part of the problem and makes the accents even harder to understand. I’ve noticed fast speech and lack of articulation is a problem even in understanding the native English speakers, too.

By: Gringo

Gringo — Sat, 27 Aug 2022 17:16:20 +0000

But one positive story with customer service calls. Several years ago I stopped my AT&T landline and Internet. Like F, I first tried a local office, and got told I needed to make a phone call instead. I got no hardsell from the service rep on either keeping my plan or transferring to another one of their plans. I replied that I could no longer afford it. That was that. Would you like to use our TV plan? No thank you. That was that.

When I returned from a trip, I found out that my landline hadn’t been cut off, a week after I had told them to do so. AT&T quickly remedied that situation, and didn’t charge me for the week of unwanted phone service.

By: Gringo

Gringo — Sat, 27 Aug 2022 17:07:59 +0000

I recently used customer service lines at a big box hardware store and my phone company. For both, I had issues with the service from (I’d bet it was) India. In one example, the line from India had a lot of static, though that was the case for only 1 of about 5 calls. I often had trouble understanding the English of the customer service rep. (As I have plenty of experience with ESL speakers both in the US, and from working overseas, it isn’t that I am unaccustomed to ESL speakers.) One of the service reps could have made his English a lot more comprehensible if he had only 1) spoken not in a soft voice but in a clear, loud voice and 2) not spoken so rapidly. Did he get no coaching?

The phone service rep was absolutely useless in answering my tech support question- as was the phone’s PDF manual that I had downloaded.

A further point about reacting to ESL speakers: if I called because I was annoyed about previous poor customer service, I found the ESL accent even more irritating.

Some three decades ago, my brother was the liaison between management and the programmers in setting up a bank’s automated phone system. I have jokingly told him that when he dies and St. Peter is deciding whether to let him in or not, his work on that automated phone system is going to keep him out of Heaven.

By: Liz

Liz — Sat, 27 Aug 2022 16:50:32 +0000

I may be “old fashioned”, but I still get paper copies of bills from the companies so I can review the bill. I don’t want to spend my ink, paper and time to print out the invoice. Reading the invoice online can result in missing something.

My local paper was bought out by USA Today and the service went downhill fast. It was amazing how fast the stop of the paper (physical as well as online access) occurred. They didn’t act that fast when I had missing papers. I still check out the website since I usually get three free articles a day. But there are very few local & state articles available.

By: Mike K

Mike K — Sat, 27 Aug 2022 16:23:51 +0000

A couple of years ago, someone hacked my cellphone service and bought several thousand dollars of new cellphones and services. I think it was an inside job, probably a store employee. It took 6 months and hours on hold to finally get the charges cancelled. I eventually quit the provider and went to another.

By: TexasDude

TexasDude — Sat, 27 Aug 2022 16:18:11 +0000

Why? So you will give up and continue paying.

By: Phil Hawkins

Phil Hawkins — Sat, 27 Aug 2022 15:31:00 +0000

Back when I was in college in the early 1970s, I worked for a man running a janitorial company. We operated in the evenings, all over the city. Back then voice mail did not exist, no computers, no cell phones. He refused to use an answering machine, but spent the money for an answering service. He said that people do not want to talk to a machine, they want to talk to a live person. I think this trend to computerized phone answering systems is one of the dumbest things American business has done in my lifetime. It may be cheaper, but it is costing dearly in customer relations.

By: Snow on Pine

Snow on Pine — Sat, 27 Aug 2022 15:06:54 +0000

Martin–

I believe I read somewhere back a few years ago that, each monthly billing cycle, some telephone companies will take all of the charges that have somehow become separated from the people who are actually responsible for them, and spread them out among all of their customer’s bills, figuring that hardly any customers actually wade through their often complex multi-page bills–containing all sorts of taxes, fees, and charges–notice, and complain to get the charges they didn’t make removed.