Incompetent Businesses

I was so pissed off earlier today. I shouldn't have been. I should have just expected it and lived with it because I'll never get to talk to a person at the company that is actually RESPONSIBLE for how things work there.

I'm reluctant to write this because I am calm now and I do not want to feel like I felt earlier while this was happening. But here goes - perhaps you can relate?

As my readers know, I recently moved to Madison, Wisconsin. I moved from Southern California, where I was lucky enough to have Verizon's FiOS TV and Data services (didn't take their phone service, was already paying for multiple cell phones). The actual service was INCREDIBLE! I have never seen such a great picture on our HDTVs, or anyone else's. Now that I'm back on Charter here in MadTown, well, the lower quality picture is very obvious. Our data service is OK here, but nothing compared to our 15meg/2meg internet connection via FiOS. The only complaint I had with FiOS Internet was that I felt the Verizon DNS servers were slow at resolving to IP addresses...but I just used OpenDNS and that slowness was solved.

On April 6th, I called Verizon and cancelled my TV and Internet services as of April 10th. I returned the equipment (data AND TV boxes) on April 8th. Today is April 4th. After many hours and several calls to Verizon (and AMEX to reverse inappropriate charges from Verizon), it looks like a very nice woman named Monica at Dallas' Verizon facility finally took care of my problem with adjustments and what not. Now I'm getting back a little money they owed me!

But what about all the time and energy (and frustration!) before this? I spent about 90-100 minutes total on the phone today with Verizon. I spent time in mid-March trying to get a final bill. I spent about an hour on April 6th over two phone calls to get my services cancelled (because of a problem in Verizon's systems in looking up my account, which ALWAYS happened EVERYTIME I EVER had to do ANYTHING with them....I'm using the caps because it was so frustrating!!!). A part of me wanted to go into excruciating detail about just how awful this experience was (for example, I was swearing at the guy by the end of the first phone call today because he started saying he was having trouble because I was changing my story about the account details... the "detail" was that near the end of my service with Verizon, they split my single account for both services into two accounts, which I didn't want....and now it's my fault for forgetting about that in the early part of my call). But I think you get the picture, so no more details on this one.

For months now I have found myself complaining to my family that I did not want to call this creditor or that creditor because I had already spent X number of hours in the past week, or two, on phone calls with idiot creditors who had done idiotic things and I was tired of doing this. Why is this going on now and why has it been going on for so long? Is it just me? If not, why are WE putting up with this kind of treatment from outfits that are supposedly serving US?

Then there was the nightmare with Cingular cellular service. I made the mistake of trying them out around Christmas 2006. I had been out of state visiting extended family in Utah when I lost my Verizon cell phone (that's actually been a pretty good experience, comparatively speaking). My contract was over with Verizon and I wanted, among other things, to get a true 3G wireless data experience to use with my laptop and/or PDA via Bluetooth (who likes wires?). Verizon simply did not offer a phone at the time capable of pulling off everything I wanted to do
and Cingular did. Cingular offered a 14 day no-strings trial period. I told them I'd need to change my phone numbers when I got back to my home State in a few days.

So, what happens? The coverage is horrible by my home in Beaumont, CA. The coverage is bad most everywhere I drive around San Bernardino and Riverside Counties, Calif. I kept track and counted - I was missing about 75% of my incoming calls when at home because the phone simply did not ring. I would find out about calls hours later when my voicemail alert would finally decide to go off. This was a virtually unknown experience with my Verizon wireless service ANYWHERE that I have had it, and I've had it in many places over the years. I started calling them the No Bars Network, but I digress.

But the truly incompetent part was, again, the billing, which I will get to momentarily. I changed numbers (I had two phones on this plan) to ones matching my home after returning there. But after a couple more days it was plain that the service just sucked, so I called to cancel my service. Guess what? I bought my equipment (phones, chargers, cases) from a Utah dealer, not from a Cingular corporate store. So, this meant I had to return the equipment to that same dealer. I like the drive from Beaumont to Salt Lake City, UT, but I had just done it and wasn't quite ready to do it again. Fortunately, the dealer had stores in St. George, UT, which was only a six hour drive (one way) from home. So, I drove the six hours to St. George, stayed overnight in Mesquite, NV, and went back to Calif the next day, six more hours.

I called Cingular corporate, again, as instructed, to let them know the equipment was returned so Cingular could "complete" my service cancellation. I recall making this call while waiting for some fast food I'd ordered on the trip home (I like to multi-task). This was all done well within their 14 day time period.

Within two weeks or so, I received not only a bill for my California Cingular services for about $125.00, I had also received a bill for my Utah Cingular service. I was busy by then, making plans to move from California to Madison, and I figured both bills would sort themselves out by the following billing cycle. Nope, I got new bills, now about $250.00 each for Utah and California. The sad part of this story is that my first reaction wasn't anger or worry. What I felt was dread with a touch of frustration. Dread that it was yet ANOTHER, incompetent company with an incompetent billing department that was going to suck up another half day of my life.

Long story short, I called Cingular to fix it, they said they'd look into it. Shortly after, I get a NASTY collection call from Ms. Thing at nasty collection agency and she "...don't care, all she knows is dat I owe dem money." And I call Cingular again. And again. I believe the total phone time with Cingular by time it was all over (gosh, I hope it's over) was about 9-10 hours over several calls and several weeks. I don't actually have a final bill showing a zero balance, but I got one today from AT&T (oh, yeah, the company name changed from Cingular during this time) for less than $50. I was told they couldn't adjust all of it this cycle, so I'd get something like this. It's all supposed to be gone sometime in mid-April.

In the 4+ months from December 1st, 2006, until today, I will hazard a guess that I've spent about 40 hours on the phone hassling with creditors of various types who have screwed up one thing or another. Failure to cancel services, failures to send me bills by US Mail (that is, being signed up for online billing -incorrectly setup- without my permission), unexplained changes to my billing address in their systems so bills were sent to addresses I have no connection to, deleting accounts from my online profiles literally days before I login to make a payment and, viola, the account I wish to pay on is GONE (usually while I'm in transit so calling to fix it is much harder, and the payment is due now), creditors charging fees while claiming I paid late even though I mailed the payment ten days before the due date and the mail is going only one state away (at least Bank of America stopped pulling this repeatedly once I started mailing with delivery confirmation - and the huge lawsuit against them for the same practice might have helped, too).

What the heck is going on with all these companies? It's not just me because it's happening to others in my household and in my extended family. At first I thought it was honest mistakes, especially with companies switching to online payment systems, etc... But it's been getting worse over too many years for me to believe that anymore. I believe it's a combination of factors, but at the heart of it all is money. These companies have little incentive to play nice because they end up collecting more money almost everytime they have an "oops". A late fee. An extra month or two of service fees because they have no record of you calling to cancel (and YOU have no record of it, either, right?). An over-draft fee (you do know, don't you, that the biggest growth area in profitability for banks and the like is in miscellaneous fees) because that deposit you made yesterday isn't available yet even though they don't normally hold your deposits anymore (but, then, you don't normally want any of your deposits back so quickly, do you?).

Before you tell me I'm being paranoid, ask yourself this. Did you know that banks have been getting advice from consultants for years now to process customer's credits in a certain pattern to increase the amount of NSF fees they can charge to your account? It works like this: Let's say you wrote 10 checks that all come through tonight. The first nine checks are all for $1.00 each. The last check is for $11.00. Let's say you only have $12.00 in your account tonight. If the bank was your friend, they'd pay out the nine checks for $1.00 each and only bounce the single check for $11.00, probably resulting in an NSF fee of $36.00. If the bank is not your friend, they will pay the $11.00 check first and then one of your $1.00 checks, and then bounce the remaining 8 checks for $1.00 each, resulting in ...hold onto your hat... $288.00 in NSF fees. Wow! In reality, many banks have stop-loss rules in your contract with them, so they probably won't charge you more than two or three NSF fees per day, so you might only owe $72.00 or $108.00. An unscrupulous bank might put some of those $1.00 checks into another pile to be processed the next day, or even to spread them over a few days, to make sure you get dinged on every one possible for an NSF fee. It is BIG business, trust me. If you pay $10/month in fees to keep your account open, that's $120 per year. They could collect nearly that much in one day with some properly sequenced bounced checks.

So, this brings me back to "incompetent businesses". Maybe they really are just incompetent. Perhaps it's something much more sinister. Maybe they just have a lot of dumb but cheap employees, and cheap is good for the bottom line. Maybe they have really great employees, but not nearly enough of them; also good for the bottom line. Whatever the reason, having pride in their operations doesn't seem to be reason enough to treat customers competently. They need a financial incentive to actually provide competent service. It has to become more expensive to provide incompetent service or they won't change. And, in this day of extremely short-term thinking (and never, ever, thinking past the bottom line in the next quarterly report), that extra expense has to be obvious and immediate.

The obvious answer is to simply not do business with the incompetent versions of the businesses you need. I decided to keep Verizon because their billing has been fine and their wireless coverage has also been as good as it gets. But I'm using Charter Communications here in Madison because, well, the alternative is no TV at all (satellite dishes at this apartment aren't feasible) and TDS for DSL (expensive). A Hobson's choice. My family has had serious billing issues with Charter in other markets and we spent a few weeks living here WITHOUT Charter, trying desperately to find an alternative. There isn't one if you want to watch SciFi Channel! Perhaps this is one reason they decided monopolies weren't such a good idea back in the 30's?

So, what do you think we should do to kick these incompetents in the butt so they'll treat us customers better?