Weird Qwest Trouble
Apr 19th, 2007 by Bethany
This week I had a weird Qwest experience. Sorry to anyone who tried to call us yesterday afternoon and discovered that our phone was disconnected. There was a strange mix-up in our bills that resulted in our phone service being turned off for a few hours. Here's what happened:
Monday I opened a bill from Quest that said that we owed them money and that they'd cut our service if we didn't pay in full immediately. There were two numbers to call on the bill, Payment Services and Customer Service. I called Payment Services right away. The person who answered the phone didn't speak English very well and wasn't very friendly, but I gave her my debit card number and she gave me a confirmation number and assured me that service wouldn't be interrupted.
Wednesday our phone service was turned off. We emailed back and forth with the Qwest people and finally Colin talked to someone on the phone while he was at work and had them turn on the phone at home as long as he promised to have me call in with the confirmation number because they couldn't find my payment.
This morning I called the Payment Services number on the bill again and the woman who answered the phone (who was rather grumpy with me and also had a thick accent) said that they hadn't turned off my phone service and that she could see my payment on the screen. I told her that they had turned off my service, but then Colin called on the other line so I politely hung up with the Payment Services lady.
Then I decided to call the Customer Service line. A man named Jerry answered the phone and was very friendly and said that he couldn't help me, but that he'd transfer me to the local office where they could help me.
Jerry transferred me to the wonderful Angie. Angie listened carefully to my problem and asked good questions. When she couldn't find my payment or even my card number in her computer system, I gave her the number of Payment Services where they had said they had record of it and she put me on hold while she called them. She was very sympathetic about their rudeness to me as they were rather grumpy with her, too. Then she got her supervisor to help her to determine what was going on with my bill and my service.
It turns out that I get two bills from Qwest (wow, no wonder I've had so many misunderstandings with them!) and that one is for my "out of region" long distance, which I didn't know existed, and the other is for my local and in-region long distance. On Monday I'd paid the bill for out of region long distance. Their computers don't talk to the in-region people's computers, which explains why the in-region Customer Service people couldn't see my transaction from Monday.
So, my favorite Qwest person, Angie, put a note on my file explaining the problem and telling everyone to leave me alone (and leave the phone on) until the next billing cycle when I would pay off the entire bill. She also put a note in my file saying that they need to get me out of the out of region long distance and put everything on one bill as soon as I pay the bill.
The moral of the story:
- I need to be more organized so that I know that I'm getting two bills from one company, and
- Qwest needs to get its computers to talk to each other if they're going to send me mail in identical envelopes.