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Re: Our Qwest Testimonial: qwestoutage.com

  • From: dan kelley
  • Date: Tue Sep 18 13:44:38 2001

is qwest-makes-my-life-hell.com available ? ;)

here's a rough one year recap of our relationship with
qwest:

1. we're overbilled by 60K, for 3 circuits that have
been disconnected for 2 years, 1 year, 3 months,
respictively.
2. our account rep leaves qwest, orpahing our account.
3. we call qwest for 5 months, speaking to roughly 8
different people in billing, major accounts, support,
etc. we can't get anyone to call us back, even after
saying things like the following:

"Your company thinks we're late of 60 thousand dollars
worth of payments.  Is there anyone at qwest who is
concerned about this?"
4. we get a new account rep, who spends 2 months
tracking down the various circuits and "internal"
disconnect orders.
5. two days after faxing us a breakdown of what
charges are legit, and which should be credited to our
account, our rep leaves qwest, orpahing our account. 
the writeup she sends is accurate.
6. we call qwest to request a new rep.
7. someone from qwest collections calls us to inform
us that our service will be disconnected if we don't
pay the portion of our bill which is now 1 year
overdue.  when weinform her that we've been trying to
reconcile our bill, she informs us that we should call
billing to discuss our "dispute".
8. we receive a new qwest rep, who sets up a 4 way
confrence call with us, himself, qwest's east coast
rep, and a controller.  we fax them the 2nd account
rep's summary of billing errors.  they all agree that
the document looks accurate.  we never hear from any
of them ever again.
9. collections calls us again.  they threaten to
disconnect a circuit if we don't settle our
outstanding invoices within 30 days.  the circuit they
threaten to disconnect has been disconnected for 18
months.
10.  we finally find someone at qwest who claims that
they can authorize our credits.  he calls back 2
months later with the following gems:  1. he claims
that he needs our copies of the disconnect orders, and
gives us the qwest internal disconnect order codes for
the circuits.  we ask him, if qwest has an internal
disconnect code for the lines, why does he need our
copies?  2. he tells us that the credits have been
approved, but that he couldn't provide immediate
written confirmation.
11.  finally, one year after we first notified qwest
of the problem, we receive our credits.  amazingly,
they appear to be correct.  for one glorius month, our
account balance is reduced to zero.
12.  the next month, qwest starts billing us
incorrectly again.  we call the billing manager who
authorized our credits.  he claims to not remember us
or our problems.

in short, we probably had 3 people spend about 40
manhours trying to inform qwest that should be
concerned that our company was not paying them.

lost in this whole mess is that their service (DS1) to
us was reasonably good. unfortunately, their
organizational sloppiness negates that for us - we'll
be dropping them as soon as other arrangements are in
place.

dan




--- Allen Gwinn <[email protected]> wrote:
> 
> Greetings,
> 
> Simply put, they've put us through hell, so I've put
> a website up to
> tell our story at qwestoutage.com.  I'd be
> interested in
> feedback--especially anyone that has had similar or
> different
> experiences than we've had.  I've heard from another
> customer (DS-3
> customer) who has had fairly good experience.  His
> comment was, "the
> hardest thing to do is to get their attention--but
> once you do that,
> they're fairly responsive."  I heard from one more
> that is
> decommissioning their Qwest circuits nationwide and
> moving back to
> UUNET.
> 
> Thanks,
> 
> Allen
> 
> 
> 


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