If You Screw Up, SAY IT!

So I had an interesting conversation today with AT&T Wireless. The Wife and I switched from Sprint to AT&T in January. Because I’m occasionally a big dumb animal I didn’t set the phones up right when we activated them. But we got them working and on the Monday after we bought them I called AT&T to get the accounts lined back out and put on one bill. (Wishing I hadn’t done that now that they have the unlimited calling plan, but I digress)

So today I get a call from a collection agency. Now I’m not one that has a great time when collection agency’s call and the first thing I do when they call is pull up the Fair Debt Collection Practices Act PDF just to make sure they follow the rules. So they tell me I owe them 47 bucks. Now I mention this because I understand that it’s a trivial amount, however, I also don’t want to be paying for something that I’ve already paid for. I log in to AT&T’s website and look at my account balance. $0.00. I tell the person that there must be some mistake and that I need to call AT&T about the bill and see what is going on. The guy on the other end of the phone was very nice and polite and had I talked to him the rest of the way I don’t think this would have been as much of an issue to resolve. Phone Call One.

Phone Call two is to AT&T to discuss what was going on. The person on the other end of the phone wasn’t extraordinarily helpful. Turns out the problem occurred when I registered the iPhone for my wife and myself. They were supposed to merge the two accounts and put us on a family share plan. Well, I thought they did. However, there was a balance left on one of the accounts. The amount was for an activation charge on the phone. I discussed with her the fact that I didn’t see a bill from them about 47.00 and that I don’t know why they couldn’t just call me and discuss the bill before it went into collections. I have no problem paying the 47.00 and just didn’t know about it to pay it. The call went on and I told her that all I really wanted was for her or someone at AT&T to admit that a mistake was made and I would go take care of the bill. She would not say it. She wouldn’t. She could see what they did and knew that it wasn’t the way it was supposed to be, but wouldn’t admit that there was a problem. This drug on for 10 or 15 minutes and she put me on hold then came back to explain to me for the 4th time that it was a left over amount and that those aren’t transferred to the new accounts unless the customer calls and specifically requests it. I made a statement about, that’s EXACTLY what I was trying to accomplish when I called to merge the bills. After about 30 minutes or more she FINALLY admitted that there was a mistake on my bill and curtly told me to have a nice day and hung up. Ok, she was annoyed and I’m sorry for that, I don’t like to mess up customer service representative’s days because they have it hard enough as it is.

Phone call three was back to the collection agency to pay the bill. Thank you for calling, blah blah blah… That will be 63.(I don’t remember the cents because I was about out of my mind that the bill went from 47.00 to 63.00 in the space of an hour. At this point, I was pretty pissed and the person who was on the other end of the phone kept saying, sir you need to quit yelling. Well, I know I wasn’t yelling, and this a rude tactic played by bill collectors because they know that all it does is annoy people and typically MAKES THEM YELL! She would not explain to me that why it went up to 63.00 so I hung up.

Call number four was back to AT&T because at this point, I wasn’t about to pay this bill collection agency 63.00 for a 47.00 bill. So I paid the bill with AT&T and got my confirmation number.

Call FIVE: Back to the collection agency to tell them that I had taken care of the bill with AT&T and that I had a confirmation number. The person on the other end of the phone said “Ok, but you still owe us 8.00.” Um, No I don’t. I don’t owe you anything I said, I paid the bill with the AT&T. To which she responded, well if you don’t pay the $8.00 we are going to report it on your credit report. Now at this point I was pretty angry because I had talked to this collection agency 3 times about the same bill and got a different amount each time. To me, that’s just infuriating and I’m sure if I took it to a good lawyer they would have a field day with it, but oh, well, no need to spend that much time, money and energy on it right? (Yet, here I am writing all this at 2:00 in the morning.) I was rude and told her that I wasn’t paying the 8.00 and hung up. I was pretty rude at the end but at this point I was pretty pissed.

Call Six: Back to AT&T where I got a nice young man by the name of Jared I think, it was. He was very nice and tried to be as helpful as he could, however, with AT&T once it goes to collections there is nothing that a customer service rep can do about it. However, talking with Jared we discovered what the problem was. They had in fact sent out 2 bills about this amount. However, when I received them, I opened them, logged in to the AT&T website and check my balance, saw it was $0.00 and through the bill in a drawer to be scanned. He was very nice and I told him about my interaction with the collection agency and he was pretty annoyed as well. He thought it was a bit outrageous and because of that, he credited my current bill $8.50 to cover the money I was going to be paying the collection agency. It was very nice of him to do and I want to state it clearly that he was done as a customer satisfaction issue and that he didn’t have to do it. I am grateful that he took it that seriously and that for once the company was on “my” side in seeing the silliness of the situation. Thank you very much Jared where ever you are tonight.

Call Seven: Back to the Collection agency. This was the most painful call of all. Because I had been rude the last time I called, I now had to eat crow and call them back and pay the bill. So when I called them back to pay the 8.00 I found out where the other 7+ dollars was coming from. See, now, I can explain this to you calmly in a blog post with little to no effort. However, the person on the other end of the phone couldn’t, or more likely wouldn’t explain to me why I had to pay 7.50 extra on top of the 8 bucks. Well, this was QUITE a contentious phone call. Knowing that collection agencies record their calls I used that to my advantage when she threatened to hang up. I explained that I was not going to pay the 7.50 and that I didn’t have to pay the 7.50. And I certainly wasn’t going to pay it if she couldn’t explain to me what it was for. So I told her that she had to explain to me what it was for and she say “Processing Fee.” So, for an 8.00 bill there is a 7.50 processing fee. Um, no. I said that I wasn’t going to pay that and it was ridiculous. She said if I wanted to pay the bill I was going to pay the 7.50. I said she needs to put it in writing what it was for before I paid it. Which she promptly refused to do. Well, see there is a problem here for her, the federal government explicitly says that they have to. In section 809 of the Fair debt collection practices act they have to tell you the amount of the debt and the name of the creditor to whom the debt it owed. So I told her that she couldn’t say no and that if she hung up I was going to take that as acknowledgement that the debt was not valid and that I didn’t have to pay it. She didn’t like this at all and the phone went dead. Next thing I know there is a “collection manager” on the phone. He was a very nice guy and explained that the 7.50 was a charge for taking a payment over the phone. And if I wanted to wait until the paper bill arrived that I could just put in a check and send it in that way and would not be charged the 7.50 processing fee.

Now that wasn’t so hard to explain really. But for me, here is the real problem, and it’s all about the money and I understand that so lets be real. They told me that the bill had been placed with them 2 days ago. That would have been on a Saturday, So they would have sent out the bill on their letterhead on Saturday at the EARLIEST. Now, if it was sent regular mail, it is not reasonable to assume that the bill would arrive at it’s destination overnight. So they were banking on the fact that I would want to clear it up as quickly as possible and they would make the extra 7.50. This doesn’t sound like much but if they do this, but if they do it once an hour for 10 hours a day it’s $1,612.50. Do it twice and hour and they make enough to pay someone to do the job, at say 7.00 and hour and a grand on the side.

End the end it’s all taken care of and I will be sending them a check, if and when I ever see the paper bill from them. But the fact is that all this could have been solved by AT&T before they sent it to collections if they had just taken the time to make the phone call and ask me about this outstanding balance. That’s all that needed to be done.