Registered: Feb 2001
Location: Houston
Posts: 72

Voicestream billing problems

I am one of the idiots who purchased Voicestream's "Datastream" package, good for 1500 "data" minutes a month for a 30$ fee. I know now I could have saved about 10 bucks a month by buying a bigger plan with no data minutes, but that's neither here nor there - I'm a big boy, I signed the contract, I can live with it. But for the third month in a row, they continue to make mistakes in their billing program that would cause you to flunk out of Basic Programming 101. The program accumulates voice and data minutes and as soon as the total exceeds my allotted voice minutes, they start surcharging me. Result: about $68 of surcharge for what should be about $4 worth of extra time used. Now I will have to spend 15 minutes (at a minimum, if I am lucky) explaining this to a CSR whose first principle is, the computer doesn't lie.

Registered: Jul 2001
Location:
Posts: 9

My wife and I had similar problems with VoiceStream for about 7 months straight. The bill would come and we'd be charged for long distance calls on the weekends. She'd call and they'd go "oh yeh, that did fall on a Saturday we'll fix it" BUT, for some reason they couldn't refund all the taxes that we payed. Ridiculous!! We decided to give them one more chance in June when we renewed with their Family Plan (Two phones same minutes). We were told by the rep in the store AND by a Customer Serive Rep over the phone that the plan included Long Distance minutes. But when we got our first bill we were charged over $200 for LD minutes that should have been covered. My wife spent over 4 hours total over a 3 day period trying to get it resolved. Finally, we got hold of a manager that would credit our account and let us out of our contract without paying the normal $400 early termination fee. So I have two Nokia 5100 phones laying around the house that won't work with any other cell phone company.

Oh, and good luck trying to get the same CSR the next time you call. One lady told us to call her back. Even gave us her ID and call station ID. When we tried to reach her again we were told to keep calling back until we reached that call station because they could route calls between call stations for some reason. We gave up after about 5 calls and 20 minutes of being on hold.

VoiceStream has good rates but their Customer Service sucks.

Registered: Mar 2001
Location: pittsburgh, pa
Posts: 72

Voicestream has CONSISTENTLY charged us for time that we had not used, in addition to that our basic bill was wrong for the first 4 billing cycles...the time involved in attempting to get their errors corrected is not worth the savings that we were promised . As soon as our contract expires we're done with them, unless of course we can get out of it sooner without the big payoff.

Registered: Feb 2001
Location: Houston
Posts: 72

I have to give Voicestream some credit. The CSR picked up right away on the fact that this is an ongoing billing problem, and credited me back the entire surcharge, plus the tax. Now if they can just hire a programmer who knows how to use two accumulators...