Donna sent a message to Glen F. Post, III President and CEO, CenturyLink, Inc. – email address that said:
Attention Mr. Glen F. Post III:
We have been Century Link customers for our Internet Services since 2004. We are 7 month residents of AZ and 5 month residents in UT. We have put our AZ service on vacation for a no. of years. I called Customer Service in April, spoke with “Debbie” and requested our service be put on vacation May 2. I was told that we were eligible for free suspended service for up to 6 months with no fee to reconnect. At that time we could ask what promotions were available for continued service.
In the hurry to leave my husband did not pay our last bill and we were billed for April with a late fee( We had never been late before). We paid this.
This month we received a bill for $17.21? I called and was told that we were being billed 9.99 per month. We were not eligible for the free vacation service since “we got that benefit last year and you could not receive that 2 consecutive years. “I spoke with 2 different Customer Service Agents (neither was a supervisor in spite of my request to speak to a supervisor and waiting on hold for 19 minutes.) The first agent was not very polite and essentially told me that was the way it was. The second agent, Maryanne, though not a supervisor, did research my billing but still told me that we would have to pay the 9.99 per month. She would give me a credit of $30 which would relieve 3 months of the monthly charge.
My concerns are:
1) the poor training of your Customer Service agents if I might call them by that name. Until I inquired, neither of these 2 agents were aware that you could not receive the free suspended service for only one time. This is the second incident of this misinformation that we have received in our tenure with Century Link and the same excuse that “they did not know “ but we, the customer, would have to just accept the higher billing. In the first instance I had actually taped the call and the supervisor told me that I would have to pay the higher rate and he would just fire the agent that had told me incorrectly. Sun City AZ is a retirement community area where probably ½ of the retired residents reside somewhere else in the summer. I am probably not the first to encounter this issue.
2) We are always told we will receive 20 mgb of service but we never get more than 4 and usually more like 2-3. It takes forever to download a file. I have been told that our area, Sun City AZ, does not have fiber optic cable and there is NO PLAN to install it in spite of the no. of customers in this area. Many of our friends have changed to Cox for this reason.
Please respond to this letter. In your capacity I feel it is important for you to understand your customer management problems. I managed a business for 20 plus years and I would not accept this from my employees. It is not really the amount, it is the poor service, poor training and poor communication.
Thank you for your attention to this matter,
Donna
