That’s ATT for you. They have the worst billing systems that I know of.
Back when they were pushing UVerse they wanted to combine billing with their other services. For what ever reason they weren’t combined to begin with.
Well when you did that you had to get both on the same cycle. UVerse I believe was post paid at the time. You needed to pre-pay as their other services. Maybe it was the other way around, don’t remember. Either way you are stuck with 2 months of UVerse plus your other services when you combine it. So a large bill.
Well here comes the fun part, I had that service for maybe a year. I canceled it and to my surprise nobody seemed to remember that I had an extra month I already paid for. The system didn’t seem to account for it.
I called numerous times and talked to quite a few different people. I ended up getting about 700 in credits because I was able to walk people through the billing who were able to see what was going on.
I thought about taking this to a few attorneys I know since this had to have impacted a ton a people. Never got around it.
I worked in IT for a Telco, and was intimately involved in the billing system, the multi-million dollar project to move everything to a new billing system, and then the new billing system.
From experience I can tell you the billing system of a Telco is at least 1000 times more complicated than I ever would have believed. Maybe 100,000 times. The number of edge cases and complicated stuff it has to deal with is utterly staggering, and every single one of them is being changed repeatedly by marketing and project managers and people from all across the company - products for partial months, discounts, packages, rate changes, non-recurring charges, changes to non-recurring charges, fees, taxes, government subsidies, overages, products that have to exist by law but we don't want to sell, products that customers have because "grandfathered", products that don't exist in real life but do in the billing system, etc. etc.
Keep in mind the billing system is extremely tightly coupled with the provisioning system (the one that actually makes the internet lights blink and the voices actually work), which has ten thousand more edge cases and complicated configuration than the billing system.
Once you dive into the provisioning system, the billing system looks straightforward!
My personal bill from the company I worked for often had mistakes, and frankly I was shocked it didn't have more!
I have often wondered how much of their billing system remains unfixed on purpose, as I am sure there is a non-trivial amount of "screw it I am just going to pay it so they leave me alone" payments they would lose if they had accurate and easy to understand billing combined with good customer service
Back when they were pushing UVerse they wanted to combine billing with their other services. For what ever reason they weren’t combined to begin with.
Well when you did that you had to get both on the same cycle. UVerse I believe was post paid at the time. You needed to pre-pay as their other services. Maybe it was the other way around, don’t remember. Either way you are stuck with 2 months of UVerse plus your other services when you combine it. So a large bill.
Well here comes the fun part, I had that service for maybe a year. I canceled it and to my surprise nobody seemed to remember that I had an extra month I already paid for. The system didn’t seem to account for it.
I called numerous times and talked to quite a few different people. I ended up getting about 700 in credits because I was able to walk people through the billing who were able to see what was going on.
I thought about taking this to a few attorneys I know since this had to have impacted a ton a people. Never got around it.