Dialing C for Complaints on the Cutting Edge

Bernadine Burlin, an Arcadia resident, is fed up with telemarketing and junk mail.

“I NEVER do any business over the phone no matter who calls,” she told me in a recent letter.

“Now, I just hang up on telemarketers [without even] saying, ‘I’m not interested.’ I burn in the fireplace anything that comes in the mail that falls into [similar] categories. As a senior, I am very careful of such things.”

I hear all the time from readers with such feelings, even if few go as far as Burlin in acting on them.

In my own case, I routinely throw away junk mail without reading it, and will hang up the phone as soon as a caller identifies him or herself as representing an unfamiliar company.

But I don’t do these things when the caller or the mail is from a company whose products I use.

Then, I pay attention to what they say. This can be prudent, since there are occasional reports of consumers getting something--and a bill--unless they explicitly say no to a firm with which they have an existing relationship.

But, on the more positive side, there’s a chance you’ll be offered a better deal than you had before.

This is particularly true with cutting-edge services like telecommunications or computers.

This became an important point in my review this past week of complaints concerning AirTouch Cellular, which, with more than a million Southland customers and 17 million worldwide, is obviously a big player in the wireless industry.

On March 24, Sam Gonen, a San Fernando Valley lender, filed a class action suit against AirTouch, alleging that the company had been “bombarding” its customers with frequent solicitations for upgrades in service or pricing changes without telling them that every time they change they were entering into a new two-year contract with the company.

Then, should customers cancel their service early, they had to pay a $150 per-instrument penalty.

Gonen says he canceled service on five phones at the end of last year, thinking his contract had expired, only to find out that because of changes he had authorized in his calling plan, it still had a year to run. He had to pay a $750 disconnect charge.

The whole system is “false, misleading and intentionally deceptive,” the suit charged.

Meanwhile, a few other consumers told me of extraordinary difficulties getting through to AirTouch customer service.

AirTouch has, in Melissa May, an unusually well-informed and assertive spokeswoman.

As a matter of fact, she told me, just five days after the class action suit was filed, AirTouch coincidentally dropped its requirement that every pricing change result in a new two-year contract.

Now, it is only when the customer orders a telephone upgrade, such as from analog to digital, that a new contract begins before the old one expires.

(When the contract does expire, it will be extended for another two years if a customer wishes to increase such benefits as free minutes for night and weekend calls. Otherwise, it continues month to month, allowing the customer to keep existing benefits.)

May was not at all apologetic about AirTouch’s active mail and telemarketing campaign directed at its own customers.

First, she said, “wireless prices are dropping, and it’s to our advantage to let our loyal customers know better pricing is available.”

The unspoken part of this is that if AirTouch customers hear some other cellular company has better rates, they may transfer.

AirTouch also wants to push the upgrading from analog to digital, on grounds it allows a wider range and reliability of calls.

The $150 early disconnect charge, May declared, is related to the sizable subsidy to customers on the equipment they use.

“AirTouch helps them to pay for their phone,” she said. “For example, the Motorola StarTac 7760 digital retails for $499. We give it to customers who sign up for a two-year contract for $299. Another example would be the StarTac 3000, an analog phone, which retails for $219. If they sign a two-year agreement, they pay $49.”

In short, this is a company on the cutting edge and the reason it contacts its customers frequently is to keep them informed and keep them from straying.

As to customer service, May said AirTouch’s plan is to lower average waiting, 6 a.m. to 5 p.m., to 40 seconds from the present 60 seconds. She said waiting averages can range up to 10 minutes at night, although some customers report much longer waits.

She said more people are being hired for customer service, to buttress the 880 who work there now.

Of course, every company has disputes with some customers, and while preparing this column I heard from Sue Haffley of Long Beach, who began denying four years ago that a closing AirTouch bill of $839.95 was valid.

After a long time of not hearing anything from the company, Haffley suddenly received a letter Feb. 18 from Creditrust of Baltimore, saying that AirTouch had sold it the bill and, with interest, it now amounted to $1,615.93.

May confirmed that AirTouch had sold many “bad debts” to Creditrust, and said Haffley should deal now only with that firm.

I called Creditrust and spoke to its general counsel, Barry Dumser.

“We purchase debt, we buy it outright,” Dumser said. “We collect what we can and we keep it.”

He said it was proprietary information just how much Creditrust paid AirTouch for the Haffley bill.

But, he added, if Haffley continues to challenge it, even after AirTouch sends supporting evidence, “we’ll cancel it,” without issuing a bad credit report.

“It’s too small a balance to litigate,” he explained. “It’s extremely unlikely we’d pursue this.”

That’s good news for Haffley, who perhaps is intervening successfully because she paid attention to unwanted mail rather than burning it in the fireplace.

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Ken Reich can be contacted with your accounts of true consumer adventure at (213) 237-7060 or by e-mail at: ken.reich@latimes.com