Tilting at windmills: One woman's impossible Qwest

January 18, 2003

I'm not a Qwest customer. I haven't been a Qwest customer since August 2000, when I moved into a new building where the phone service is provided by a reseller, American Communications, which installed the building wiring.

So why does Qwest think it has the right to cut off my phone service because it (mistakenly) thinks part of the reseller's bill wasn't paid? And to send this account I don't have out to a collection agency, ruining my good credit for their mistake?

And why haven't they been able to fix it for seven months?

As it happened, Qwest CEO Richard Notebaert dropped by the News' office on Monday, on his regular circuit of goodwill, get-acquainted tours of places that buy ink by the barrel. He brought along Annette Jacobs, executive vice president and president of the consumer markets group, and they both had a lot to say about improving customer service.

So I told them my experience of non-customer disservice, and gave Jacobs the contact information for American Communications. Amid florid protestations of how important it is that they hear about problems like mine, they said they'd be getting on it right away.

Right away hasn't happened yet. No one's called me, and no one has called my contact at American Communications, Jeannie Draper.

A reseller's chief problems with Qwest, Draper said, are billing and long distance and my account involved both. The problem started when Qwest separated billing for local and for long-distance service.

When American Communications paid the bill, it was somehow posted to the wrong account. The one that received the payment, and shouldn't have, duly spit out a refund check. The one that should have received the payment, and didn't, triggered the referral to a collection agency.

Twice.

The agency called me at work; it called me at home early in the morning before I got up and late at night after I'd gone to bed. And at least on the first go-round, I had no idea what they were talking about. I hadn't ignored any bills from Qwest, because I'm not a Qwest customer and I don't get bills from Qwest. I hadn't neglected to respond to their dunning letters, either. They were sending them to American Communications' address, not mine.

Eventually Draper and I figured it out, and we had a three-way conversation with a Qwest representative which was supposed to fix everything. But it didn't. The second time around, just a couple of weeks ago, I knew what to tell the collection agency operator, and apparently she and Draper have made arrangements to pay the bill through the agency, which ought to satisfy Qwest's computers.

Notebaert said Qwest is eager to be in the reselling business, though, he said, he would prefer to be able "to charge a margin allowing a profit in my lifetime." At Notebaert's level, that's undoubtedly true. Qwest might have "the last mile" of telephone cable run to customers' homes, but in my building it doesn't have the last 150 (vertical) feet.

However, I'm less certain that the message has trickled down to the people in the front line, who write the software interfaces and answer the customer-service lines. They sometimes behave as if they believe it is in their company's interest to make resellers' service as unsatisfactory as possible.

Draper has had problems getting customers listed in directory assistance, or correcting their addresses. Until she recently connected with a new Qwest representative, she said, it was like pulling teeth to order featured services for their new customers. But if that's gotten better, other things have gotten worse. People who move into a building like mine often don't know where they need to call to get local service. Earlier, she said, if they called Qwest -- a natural assumption -- the building address would trigger a flag and they'd be told, "this is the number you need to call." Now, she says, they're just told Qwest doesn't have service to that building but they don't know who does.

Well, of course they know. American Communications buys hundreds of phone lines from Qwest. Jacobs and Notebaert made much of Qwest's new service model where the first representative you talk to can do whatever you need, instead of just passing you along to someone else in a different department who might not be the right person either. One-stop service is a good idea, but in the case of resellers, it's not working.

Because I couldn't get long-distance service, I chucked the landline entirely and now I'm on a Sprint cell-phone plan I share with my son and daughter-in-law. It's got loads more features, including wireless Internet that works even when I'm traveling, and it's a lot cheaper.

I'm not a Qwest customer. I'm unlikely ever to be a Qwest customer again. Is this the way to run a telephone company?