Phone Questions? Let Your Fingers Do the Walking . . . and Walking

I’ve had a good deal with MCI: 5 cents a minute for toll calls in California; 15 cents nationwide. So, when MCI announced last fall that it also was selling local service, I immediately signed up.

But when it started billing me in the middle of the month and wouldn’t shift the telephone bills to the start of the month, and it seemed its local bills were running higher, I decided in January to jump back to Pacific Bell for my local service.

That’s when my trouble began.

It used to be calls to PacBell went swiftly. I was astonished when the call to restore their local service went on more than 50 minutes, as the overly solicitous agent raised all sorts of options and asked endless questions, repeating many of them.

Then, I started getting two bills a month, one from PacBell for local service and another from MCI for long distance. For years, my MCI and PacBell service had been billed together by PacBell.

Recent calls to the two to try to get the bills once again consolidated showed what many people have been finding out these days: What was once simple with telephone companies now has become a nightmare.

PacBell referred me to MCI, saying it could do nothing.

Just getting a person to come to the phone at MCI has become a test of ingenuity. Their electronic system ran me through a list of options that did not apply, and then, when I didn’t push the button for any, simply repeated the options. There was no option to speak to anyone.

I’ve learned in such instances not to let on that I have a push-button phone. If you never push any buttons at all and simply sit there, the system surmises you still have a rotary phone and eventually someone will answer. With MCI, it took about 10 minutes.

The first representative said there was no such thing as bill consolidation. He said no supervisors were available to talk about it, either. I reached a second representative on another call. She told me consolidation was available, and also dropped in an aside that I still had MCI local service, because, she said, PacBell had never notified MCI that I had shifted back to it.

It took her 25 minutes and a number of intra-company calls, while I held on, to arrange for my bills to be consolidated under PacBell. In 10 minutes, she told me, I would get a verifier call to ascertain for sure that I was who I said I was.

That call soon came, from a separate company, TelQuest of Sergeant Bluff, Iowa. Their representative said the FCC had mandated that an independent company verify each requested change of service. (An MCI spokesman denied later that it was mandated by the FCC, saying it is done at the choice of MCI).

In any event, the TelQuest operator had my order wrong. She said she was confirming that I was shifting my long distance service to MCI, not consolidating bills, and there would be a charge for the change that MCI would compensate me for. When I told her I had had MCI long distance for years, she had no reaction except to say she had different information from MCI.

Rejecting the erroneous order, I called a third MCI representative (after driving to the office, since by now I was quite late for work).

This representative told me that TelQuest had advised MCI to cancel all my MCI service, including my credit card. It only took a few minutes, however, for her to restore it.

She too put through a bill consolidation, and much later, when I got home, I got a second call from the verifier, TelQuest. But they still had the same wrong order.

The TelQuest operator mentioned that she hears from many frustrated MCI customers. I can’t imagine why.

But now, I am told by a PacBell official that my consolidation has gone through, or part of it has. MCI long distance calls made from my home, she said, will now be billed through PacBell, but calls made from elsewhere on my MCI credit card will still be billed separately.

I’m going to wait a month to see what bills actually show up before taking up the subject again.

I did call both the PacBell and MCI public relations offices to see if they had any official comment.

At MCI, spokesman Brad Burns said the company has reduced the number of personal agents and gone to more electronic service because “automation is coming into play” at a time when so many more telephone service options are being offered. As for TelQuest, he said my bad experience with it was “an isolated incident” and that normally it gives very good service. MCI is very pleased with TelQuest, he said.

It took four calls to the administrative headquarters operators of PacBell, and three wrong numbers provided by them, including one for a person who no longer works for the company, before they succeeded in putting me through to a press spokesman.

One operator at the administrative headquarters mentioned in passing that since PacBell’s merger with Southwestern Bell, “things around here have been terribly confused.”

Spokesman Steve Getzug said service calls to PacBell “can seem to be an arduous process,” but “we are trying to get correct information” about what service customers want. This has made calls take longer, he said.

Ah, I reflected, deregulation and modernization are really great!