Thread: Qwest steals your customers

I work for a smallish ISP in the middle of the Colorado Rockies. We offer DSL among various other services and because Qwest owns all of the phone lines here we have to work with them (Qwest). The majority of our clients choose to use us rather than Qwest.net or MSN as the ISP because of our support and a lot of these people are very technically inept, which is ok, but they don't understand what qwest is telling them 9 times out of 10 .

Qwest has a nasty habit of randomly switching the ISP of our customers when they call Qwest about their phone service. I will receive a disconnect order from Qwest and call the customer to make sure the disconnect was legitimate. Some of these disconnect orders come in late at night so when I get to the office in the morning I will get a call from the customer wondering why their internet does not work. I check and see that they have a disconnect order from qwest and inform them what has transpired. Most of the time I can have the customer call qwest and tell them they did not knowingly authorize the change in ISP and the issue will be resolved in the next few hours. This morning I had to spend an hour on the line with qwest because they reversed the change of ISP but only on their accounting system and completely neglected to actually change the ISP back to us. I had to debate with the tech support person (from India) that the customer service agent fucked up. Finally I got it resolved but I am sick of this being a 'normal' process I have to go through because Qwest is a bunch or R tards.

(ok the Qwest agents that work in Salt Lake are actually very helpful but the rest of them can bite my shiny metal ass)

Thanks for listening to my rant.

I feel your pain
I used to work at a small ISP/CLEC that did DSL and phones in an area where the lines were all AT&T (Well SBC at the time)
They were always pulling shenanigans like that.

This smacks of anti-trust violation...I'd call the FTC.

Originally Posted by Consultant

This smacks of anti-trust violation...I'd call the FTC.

The big telcos always write this stuff off as an "oops" or "the guy told us he wanted to change his service" kind of thing.

Phone deregulation was a total failure. Luckily most states learned that, and did it better with electric making the equipment owning monopoly and the service providing monopoly split up into 2 separate companies.

Originally Posted by Gumby

Originally Posted by Consultant

This smacks of anti-trust violation...I'd call the FTC.

The big telcos always write this stuff off as an "oops" or "the guy told us he wanted to change his service" kind of thing.

Pretty much, we just document whenever it happens now and submit it to our Qwest rep.

Reminds me of an experience my girl and I had with AT&T a year ago when we moved from an apartment to a rental house. The Internet didn't work the day they said it would and after arguing with them for two weeks they finally learned that our address wasn't 122, it was 1022. They still couldn't get it working after we gave them another two weeks so we gave up, told them to cancel everything and went to another company. Shortly thereafter, we received a bill, my girl went to the headquarters which is right down the road from her office and made a scene. I went a whole month of no Internet at home, I was so pissed off the guys in India were never familiar with my case each time I called. It's like I was calling for the first time EVERYtime I called.