Arrrgggghhh
I like to check my online visa statement every now and then when I log in to my credit union. While looking at it today, I noticed that I received a $41 charge from Vonage. If you recall, I canceled my Vonage account awhile back after I had been a customer for 13 months. When I called to cancel, the CR rep told me that there would be no cancellation fee because I had been a customer for over a year.
I called their customer care number today and spend roughly 45 minutes on the phone. First it was a very long hold time, then I talked to a man named Peter who had a very strong indian accent. (I was pretty sure that Vonage had sourced a lot of their customer care work in India). Peter was nice and informed me that it looked like they had incorrectly charged me for this. He put me on hold for about 5 more minutes while he “confirmed” this, and then he said that he didn’t have the tools to fix it and would transfer me to “Billing”. Another 10 minutes on hold and then I talked to a lady in NJ. (Wow, if that doesn’t highlight our global economy, I don’t know what does. Call a U.S. number which routes to India, which then is transferred back to NJ). I told the lady that she didn’t have nearly as strong of an Indian accent as the last person I talked to and she said, “I hope not because I’m in New Jersey”.
Anyway, after a few minutes on the phone with her, she informed me that she would reverse the charges. I’m still waiting to confirm that.
Needless to say, I’m a little bit mad. I had to spend 45 minutes of my life on the phone to get a company to fix a mistake. I think that’s pretty bad, if not sneaky, to put a charge on an old customer’s credit card over two months after they canceled their account. I will not be doing business with them again, that’s for sure.
I am sure that they do stuff like this on purpose and make money off the people who are not careful enough to catch it. This same stuff happens everytime that I change cell phone carriers too. Sneaky.
Something I’ve said before is that it is useful to take advantage of the “virtual” credit cards some services offer. These numbers can be set to expire at a certain time (you can always keep extending the expiration), and can be configured to only allow a certain total charge. If you set up a card for a service (e.g., Vonage), when you cancel the service you can cancel the virtual card number.
Cell phone companies do the exact same thing. I find these “mistakes” every so often and have to call because if I dont the larger corporations add up all the little cents they are getting and inturn make an extra million that month. I mean they seriously PREY on every consumer trying to get every dollar out of them and they figure the majority of them wont call in. Sorry but im not that stupid.
You know one of the best investments I’ve ever made? $10 on a used AT&T speakerphone. Works great, and I just surf the internet while on hold.
Be sure to use this site to avoid the phone tree if you know you need a human:
http://www.paulenglish.com/ivr/
I feel ya Hazzard…not only did I spend quite a chunk of time on the phone with India over HSBC’s mortgage mistake, I spent 2 hours on the phone yesterday on the phone with Quicken technical support. I *knew* when I started the call that my data file is corrupt, but they forced me to spend 2 hours on the phone with them going through the script…trying things that weren’t related to the problem (boot windows in safe mode? sigh). Now I have to wait “24-48 hours” (though they mean business days apparently as I have nothing yet) for the instructions to upload my corrupted file for data recovery. Anyway, I had to laugh when the (clearly Indian) rep introduced himself as “Brad”.
Caitlin – There is nothing funny about the Indian rep calling himself “Brad”. He is doing this to make it easy for his American customers who otherwise will have trouble pronouncing his name (or any non-American name for that matter). In all likelihood, he was pressured by his employer to pick an American-souding name for his phone personality, and goes by his real name in his real life.
From everything that I’ve read, they are required to choose an American name for multiple reasons. I know that one is that it’s easier for Americans to pronounce names they are familiar with, but another is to try to prevent customers from being angry about the work being sourced in India. Another thing they do is take language classes to change their dialects. Some are so skilled that they can change their dialect based on where the customer is calling from within the US.
Hazzard