Qwest - Phoenix Metropolitan area - poor customer service

Complaints.com received the following consumer message on March 13, 2002:

From: Email User

Qwest - Phoenix Metropolitan area - poor customer service

Qwest Telephone Company treats it's customers the way some medieval kings treated peasants. Qwest is currently the only company providing local telephone service in the Phoenix Metropolitan area. Additional services such as wireless and Qwest digital Custom Choice TV and On-line services pretty much guarantees Qwest a customer in every household.

Rates for basic telephone service run about average for the nation with Qwest TV and On-line services slightly higher than average and their Wireless services considerably higher. The fact that Qwest is making quite a profit from the Valley of the Sun is quite evident on these facts alone however factor in the tax incentives both City and State governments seem to hand out to anyone with a business license and now understanding the company's continued profit margin even with recent economy shifts is not so puzzling.

Most business's in Qwest's position would value their customers and along with improving technology for greater profits they would also strive to improve customer service.

This is where Qwest differs from the norm. As many customers will testify they have been told that if they do not care for the service provided by Qwest that they may disconnect service at anytime. I have actually been told this myself by one customer service agent who handles service repairs and by a supervisor in the billing department. After 6 mos of daily requests to fix phone lines coming into the neighborhood the Qwest technician who came out actually suggested that I contact my county commissioner as well as the consumer affairs office of the attorney generals office.

I did not badger this employee into making this statement in fact I barely spoke to him the service repair request records he had told him everything he needed and unfortunately he said my situation was not unique but occurring all across the valley.

My service with Qwest includes two telephone "land" lines one dedicated to my computer that I depend on 24hrs for my income, the second line is for our family's communication needs. I have 3 cell phone's through Qwest one for myself the other two for my husband and teenage children.

My wireless plan allows unlimited calls between cells and home lines (teenagers are only allowed to have cells with them when driving and then only for calls between cells and house) we also have Qwest choice TV service including premium channels. If this is not enough to prove to Qwest that I am a dedicated customer my elderly mother lives 2 houses down and her phone bill comes in my name to my address.

August of 2001 is when the trouble really started. My phone service to the house became filled with static then their was no service at all. This is when we noticed that in the middle of the road telephone wires could be seen poking up through the asphalt. I immediately called Qwest from my cell phone and requested repair service. The representative was kind enough to suggest she forward all our calls to my cell phone until repairs were made.

Service man comes out within two days he opens my box and listens on his handset I then show him the exposed wires in the middle of the street. He then writes on a clipboard and gets back in his truck to leave telling me he can do nothing about it that I need a line crew to fix the problem and that he would forward that request. Read over this service man's visit roughly 20 some times as this is what occurred over the next few months over and over again.

No line crew would show up I am using cell phones for home communications, I would call Qwest and let them know service had not been restored they would apologize and promise to send someone out right away. Repairman shows up has not idea about the exposed wires until I show him then they write on clipboard say they will request a line crew and off into the sunset they ride.

In the meantime my mother's service is disconnected. As mother is quite elderly and ill she does not use her phone anymore the only purpose of that line is to transmit should an emergency occur information from the device my mother wears around her neck to the proper source. I did not discover the disconnection until probably 2-3 wks later. I immediately call Qwest and they inform me that my mother's let her phone bill of $40 become delinquent so it was disconnected. First of all her bill comes to me and is in my name and secondly I pay from a scheduled account online through Qwest's own website monthly we were not delinquent.

Arguing with Qwest does no one any good so I did not even try as long as mother's service would be restored immediately. The next day my husband calls from mother's the phone is working again. All is right with the world until I look at my caller ID and see a name and number that I do not recognize. Yes, the name "Mike Hunt" (try saying that real fast and you start thinking maybe not so accidental) and a local number appear every time a call from my mother's house comes in. Detective that I am I call my mother's number only to be told that service is disconnected.

I call Qwest and alert them to the problem and am told I have a bigger problem. In order for my mother's service to be restored there needs to be no other service active for her residence. Sounds simple however service and repair tell me that their is no service showing going to my mother's house and that I need to have billing/sales stop it on their end.

Of course billing/sales states that they only order turning on service and that they show service at the location so I need to have repair disconnect. Repair states that the number I have given them is a local number but for a residence over 10 miles from our location and that they have a disconnect order on that residence however there is no service currently at that location. ********ARE YOU STARTING TO THINK THIS IS SOME SKIT FROM ABBOTT AND COSTELLO?????

Weeks go by with me calling Qwest an average of 3 times per week and the length of those calls could vary from 5 minutes to 2 hours it depended on who I was transferred to. Finally it just became a nightmare my mother had a cardiac incident and we called 911 from her house, we did not even think about the phone situation because we were in panic mode. Then we waited and waited for what seemed eternity.

When the paramedics and firemen arrived they were not too happy to have been sent on a wild goose chase. It seems when a call comes into 911 the system is set up to show the address of the call to speed up arrival time only Mother's phone number showed we were 10 miles away from where we really were. Thank goodness all turned out all right health wise for my Mom. This allowed me to focus 100% on the almost complete loss of income that I desperately rely on due to the fact that a line crew was always on request but never to show up.

When I calmed down and called again the representative of course apologized then told me it was not Qwest's fault that they had ordered the city to "Blue stake" the area and could do nothing until this was complete. I informed the rep that a city vehicle had come out and spray painted all over the street and sidewalk was this what she was referring too. She said "yes" now they could send out the line crew. I informed the rep that this spray painting had occurred over two months ago, two months of me having to watch my business dry up and my cell phone minutes skyrocket.

This is when I received the response that I will always attribute as the Mission statement for the whole Qwest Companies. " IF YOU ARE NOT HAPPY WITH YOUR SERVICE FROM QWEST YOU CAN DISCONNECT YOUR SERVICE AND GO GET CRICKET (cricket being the new wireless company in town offering unlimited local minutes for $39 month) She then ended our call with this parting farewell "I SHOULD INFORM YOU THAT YOU HAVE ENTERED INTO AN ANNUAL CONTRACT FOR YOUR WIRELESS SERVICE SO YOU WILL BE HELD RESPONSIBLE FOR THE DURATION OF THAT CONTRACT SHOULD YOU DECIDE TO TERMINATE PHONE SERVICE" Click...

Two days later a repairman shows up at my house I think he is a little small for being a whole line crew and guess what he doesn't know anything about a line crew. I then explain my situation to him and he tells me that there is no reason for me to be losing business and incurring such wireless charges he will just string me a temporary line until the line crew can come out. I have to restrain myself from lavishing my gratefulness upon him as I fear scaring him away.

Three hours later I have a dial tone inside the house, not 2 dial tones like I pay for but you know after all the problems I was feeling really grateful to Qwest for that one dial tone, how sick is that? I do want to put in here how this dial tone came to be in my house. The repairman located the phone box that originates my service across the street from me, he then climbed up a tree in the yard across the street, climbed approx. 20 feet up then shimmied up and out across this lone branch that hangs over the street.

Then he wrapped and wrapped that white cord all the way around and around the trunk of my neighbors tree and around and around that branch that he was perched so precariously on it was about at this point that he starts winding up and then tosses the line over the street and onto the roof of my garage. He climbs down the tree, climbs up onto my garage roof, climbs down from roof attaching the temporary line with many many nails and hooks into the stucco that is the side of my garage.

He then drinks the two cokes I offer him assures me that the line crew will be out by Wed (he installed the temp line on a Sun). Before he could escape, the president of my local HOA came over to ask how long that white cord would be violating the communities C C & R's R's as I could be facing pretty hefty fines for such an eye sore. Mr. repairman saves the day assuring all to normalcy by Wed.

You guessed it over a month later I am still calling trying to get a line crew out to the house. My HOA is breathing down my neck with threats of liens on my property to cover the many fines that were adding up. The dial tone had to be delegated to the income side of things which meant the computer could communicate with the outside world however no one else could unless they racked up those wireless minutes.

My plan only gave me 800 Mon thru Fri minutes no matter how much I begged my case they would not increase that nor give me any kind of credit for the inconvenience. About this time the helpful repairman that I mentioned first in this long winded account showed up. He had been sent to disconnect the "ghost" service at my mother's house. After he had left I again felt that sense of gratitude to Qwest now my mother could have phone service again of course they could not schedule turn on for another two weeks and she no longer would have the number she and all her friends both here and in Asia had been using for years.

They gave her a number with no rhyme or reason I promptly mailed out to everyone in her address book the change I might add that a lot of my mother's older friends treated me quite coldly for a while as they thought I had allowed my mother's phone service to be disconnected which meant I had dishonored her. I also made stickers and stuck them every where I though my Mom might be able to spot should she be asked to provide such a number.

Good new Mom's service is on and in her name....Bad news I receive her first bill and in addition to her basic service and of course the not so small installation charge I find five full pages of billing for a wireless phone number that I do not recognize and a charge of $79.00 added to my bill for such a number. I immediately called Qwest but their office had closed so I did the next best thing I called the wireless number from my bill. A very nice young lady answered the phone I then tried to explain to her that somehow Qwest had screwed things up so that her charges were on my bill.

She did not seem to be as upset as me until I mentioned to her that I had a detailed listing of every call both outgoing and incoming processed by her phone. She began to get disturbed, I assured her I would shred the listing and contact Qwest the next business day, I gave her my phone number to reference and suggested she might call too. Two weeks later and over 200 minutes of cell time to Qwest I was assured I would have a credit on the next billing and would no longer have sensitive information that did not belong to me.

Guess what about this time the line crew showed up!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Guess what???

They fixed the permanent line so I no longer needed that temp line that was driving everybody else crazy. IT SURE WOULD HAVE BEEN NICE FOR THEM TO FIX THE SECOND LINE THAT I CONTINUE TO PAY FOR WHILE THEY WERE AT IT.

What do I do??? Same as always I call through Qwest TV as they now have some great power over my account and anything I do that has to do with repair has to be routed through their dept. (translation I call their number tell whole story to rep who then x'fer's me to repair rep where I tell the whole story over again.)

Present time - The atmosphere has changed in regard to how I deal with this company.

You see my income has been affected greatly by their incompetence and so has my phone bill. I had never ever paid for even one minute over what was allotted in my calling plan until we no longer had a "communication line" operational in the house. The $300 bills I paid, last month when it was over $400 I paid without a peep my mother's oldest sister in Tokyo passed away during that time and we had no choice but to use our cell phones I had expected it to be more but when I opened up my billing this month and saw the charge for $506.10 I had reached my breaking point and then I opened Mom's bill and saw the pages and pages of information I was promised would not appear again.

I have already put in over 52 minutes most on hold trying to get to the correct person that has the authority at Qwest to handle either crediting my account a whole hell of a lot of money while apologizing a whole hell of a lot more but can also give me written proof that personal and confidential information not pertaining to me or my households will no longer be provided to me.

I found out today that the state is suing Qwest for it's lack of customer service and I allowed that to buoy my spirits thinking for just a second that Qwest would clean up their act now what choice did they have??? Then I remembered that this is not the first time that the state of Arizona has sued Qwest, they won the other suit too. I do not know the exact monetary amount awarded but it was large.

Did that judgment affect how Qwest treated it's customers? It sure did it motivated Qwest to ask the state to allow them to raise basic phone service charges to cover escalating costs of business they had encountered. Arizona state was ever so happy to give permission and all the customers now not only get screwed by Qwest but are paying doubly for the pleasure of it.

Well, not this customer any longer. Quality customer service is something that every business should strive for. In a competitive business market every good CEO knows that you never lose just one customer, you lose potential customers who know the one customer and so on and so on. It also is less costly to keep a current customer then to cultivate a new one. Unfortunately Qwest does not have to operate in the competitive business market they have their customers handed over by a state that is blinded by corporate flim flam.

Enough for me

Eileen Akutagawa

Comment On This

I was considering Quest because I am not happy with Cox communications and being a new Arizonia coming from California I was not sure who to use. Cox solicited me so I went with them first. I have had to incure travel expenses constantly traveling down there to get my services situated before I am permanent in the state. I must say thank you infinity to Eileen for sharing your experience about QUEST. I will not make the mistake of switching from one bad company to a worse company. All in all I hope your mother is ok. That part of your story is what did it for me to say no to Quest. Never use them I said. God Bless

Katherine

Comment On This

I had almost the same exact thing happen here in Apache Junction. Ony on top of everything else we had DSL and We ended up cancelling it because the modem was bad. They sent us a return address tag withan RMA number and we returned the modem. This was about 2 1/2 years ago. So tonight my husband is looking at the bill and he says what's this $5 for a modem? I called them and they said "You never returned the modem". Now who keeps a receipt from 2 1/2 years ago where they returned something and can find where it is! The gal said she would take the monthly charge off but they couldn't issue us a credit unless we could prove we sent the modem back. Why wouldn't we? The reason we quit service was because the Modem was bad! Did we want to pay $5 a month for a door stop? I don't think so!! Screwed again by Qwest! BTW We had been trying to get DSL again for the last 2 years and we can't even get it here!