How can I fix my phone bill?

John W. Schoen Senior Producer • Profile • E-mail

This week, Doris in Texas is having trouble getting the phone company to live up to their promise to give her some free calls. (One solution may just be in hanging up the phone.) Meanwhile, Bernard in Alaska wants to know why his local bank asked him so many annoying questions when he went to open a new account.

JUST HANG UP
I am having problems with my phone company. They had told me that I would not be charged for minutes used for one month. Now it seems that is not the case. I have a very large bill now and no way to pay it. What can I do about this?
          Doris P., Santa Fe, Tex.

There are two ways to proceed when a company break its promise. The first step is to try to reason with them. The second step is to take legal action.

Many people give up on this first step, largely because the experience of dealing with large companies’ telephone-based response systems (especially the new “automated” variety) is so excruciating. In the name of efficiency, toll-free “customer care” has eliminated any hope of maintaining an ongoing customer relationship with a real salesperson. As each new call goes to the “next available operator,” a promise made by one agent can be easily ignored by the next one. (Whether this nightmare was created by default or design doesn’t much matter – the effect is to eliminate many “customer care” problems through attrition.) You’re supposed to give up.

But there’s a simple way of turning this dastardly discontinuity in your favor: If you don’t get the response you want, just hang up and try again. Think of this as a kind of reverse Russian Roulette: you’re looking for the one “yes” in a chamber full of rounds marked “no” or “please try again later.”

We recently played this game successfully with a phone bill of our own. When our daughter embarked on a college semester abroad, our “10-cents-a-minute” provider suddenly found some fine print governing overseas calls. The bill for the first month – at $1 a minute – came to over $750. The first (and second through fifth) customer service rep explained there was “nothing they could do.” The sixth rep cheerfully agreed that we were eligible for a “courtesy credit” for the calls if we signed up for a “special 12-cent-a-minute” international plan. Problem solved. We’ve since tried this with several other toll-free customer lines with some success.

Of course, you’ll have to learn to like elevator music — or worse, the mind-numbing, repetitive cycle of ads for a company you are already firmly convinced you never want to do business with again. You may lose a few hours of your life to this pursuit. But if the amount in dispute is large enough, it will be time well spent.

Alas, if you’ve spent so many hours that you’re singing the company jingle in your dreams — and still haven’t resolved the problem — you may want to try Plan B. But there are several problems with legal action. First, many consumer promises are made verbally which, while it doesn’t make them any less binding, does make them much harder to prove. So wherever possible, get that promise in writing. (If you can't, tell the salesperson you'd like to record any verbal sales assurances for "quality assurance purposes.") Worse, unless the bill in dispute is huge, legal costs will burn through any financial benefit you’ll get from resolving the dispute in your favor.

That’s why we often suggest contacting the Consumer Affairs Department of your state Attorney General’s office to file a complaint. If you do, keep notes of your efforts to contact the company, along with any documented evidence of the company’s broken promise. Filing a complaint is no guarantee you’ll get satisfaction. But if enough consumers complain about the same company, that pattern of abuse makes each individual’s claim much stronger. And companies that actually care about trying to keep their customers happy would rather not accumulate a thick file of complaints with state consumer affairs regulators.

So hang in there. And if you don’t get the answer you want, hang up and try again.

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