Over the past three years, our family's phone bill has averaged about $52.08 per month. That's our local, wires-throughout-the-house SBC invoice, which includes things like the local line, a long distance plan, call waiting, caller ID, a few other odds and ends, and taxes. It's not particularly cheap, but for a family of six, not entirely unreasonable.This month's bill arrived right on schedule. It felt about the correct size, weight, and thickness. But you can likely imagine my chagrin when I opened it and saw the bottom line was over $625.
"Hmmm," I remember thinking, with obvious flair for understatement. "That's odd." It didn't take long to find the reason for the largesse: ten calls to Israel.
I should explain a little about my family before I go much further. When I married Mrs. Yuhas a few years ago, she came already equipped with three children. The oldest, my stepdaughter, is now 18. She was a great student in high school, and seems to be doing well as a college freshman away from home. We threw her a big soiree in honor of her 18th birthday. Lots of her friends attended, including at least a couple of boys who seemed intent on getting to know my daughter better. Daughter ended up spending a lot of time with one of these gentlemen over the summer. He's a nice fellow. He always appreciated my cooking and even helped wash dishes afterward. He treats my daughter well. They apparently see stars in each other's eyes. They make a cute couple.
This romance is continuing -- as best it can be -- even as daughter's boyfriend is satisfying his obligation to serve in the Israeli armed forces. And that, naturally, is the reason for the phone calls to Israel. Calls billed at $4.94 per minute.
I marvel at modern-day communications. While I was content with my stout Western Electric 500-series rotary dial telephone back in the day, today's youngsters enjoy such amenities as web-enabled cellular phones, email, instant messaging, and more. There are truly many ways to be in touch. Technology has shrunk the globe.
In fact, daughter's boyfriend has a cellular phone with a plan that allows him to call her at very reasonable rates. Perhaps she thought she could call him at rates approaching reasonableness.
The first thing Mrs. Yuhas did when she saw the large invoice was to call our daughter and discuss the situation. The exchange was rife with tension and gnashing of teeth. I was glad I let Mrs. Yuhas speak with daughter. I wasn't particularly in the mood to. I was saving myself for the call to SBC.
Customer service is somewhat of an obsession for me. In my line of work, I think I'm giving the best possible service, but without feedback from my customers, there's no way to confirm this. Thus, I welcome honest appraisals. Likewise, whenever an unexpected problem develops with a product or service I've purchased, I always call the company to advise them of my concern. I figure, as a consumer and good citizen, it's the least I can do to help.
For instance, a few years ago the packaging for Head & Shoulders shampoo underwent a metamorphosis. It was a stylistic leap forward, but from a practical standpoint, the new packaging was less than adequate. It leaked! Whenever warm water would hit the bottle in the shower, shampoo bubbles and residue would ooze out of the top of the supposedly-closed vessel. Mind you, the amount of shampoo lost to this phenomenon was an insignificant percentage of the overall contents, but I still thought the people at Proctor & Gamble would want to know of my experience.
And the people at P&G welcomed my call! They confirmed that they had recently changed their packaging and that in an interim phase of production, some bottles did not perfectly mate with their lids, and occasional oozing resulted. The P&G representative seemed genuinely happy that I was using their product. She apologized profusely that I was having trouble, and sent me a coupon for a free replacement bottle of shampoo. What's more, she also sent a coupon for bathroom cleaner so I could tidy up the mess the leaking shampoo bottle cap had left. This was the height of customer service!
From past experience with SBC, I knew my call to inquire on the current situation would be somewhat less fulfilling. My most recent dealing with "the phone company" occurred when I wanted to switch long distance providers. My long distance company at the time was Sprint, which had raised their monthly fee with little provocation or notice. SBC was promoting a long distance package that included a certain number of intrastate as well as interstate call minutes per month for a flat fee. They offered a $25 Visa gift card as an incentive to get people to switch to their plan. Sounded great. All I had to do was order the service on SBC's website.
Which is all well and good, except SBC's website did not work. Didn't work on the PC at the office. Didn't work on the Macintosh at home. No combination of browser or computer yielded success. A phone call to the good people at SBC was necessary.
And the people at SBC welcomed my call! The representatives (yes, there were several who tried to help me) were deeply apologetic, but the $25 Visa gift card offer only applied to service ordered via their (broken) website, not via phone. How's that for irony? The phone company actively discouraged its customers from using the phone to order their service. Eventually I reached a higher-up representative that fully appreciated the ironic depth of my predicament, and authorized the $25 Visa gift card. This person worked hard to do the right thing. She made me feel like SBC appreciated my business. I was satisfied. This last impression of SBC was good, and I carried it with me until earlier this week.
Before I called to discuss my family's $4.94 per minute calls to Israel, I did a little shopping online to learn the going rate for USA-to-Israel phone cards. There were many from which to choose. It's a competitive marketplace, too, with most being in the range of eight to thirteen cents per minute, though calls to mobile phones in Israel would be higher. One thing that was common to all the phone cards was that each billed in increments of no less than one minute. And SBC charged a minimum of one minute, too. As it happened, six of the ten calls on our bill were one minute in duration. There were two groups of three one-minute calls in rapid succession, leading a reasonable person to conclude that perhaps those calls did not result in an actual exchange of words between daughter and boyfriend.
I'm glad I waited a day after I received the $625 invoice before I called SBC. This allowed me to calm down, cool off, and approach the situation rationally.
Vanessa came on the line after the obligatory few minutes on hold. We exchanged pleasantries as she identified me as the SBC customer I claimed to be. She brought up my bill and found the ten calls to Israel. I explained my concerns. I asked why these calls were so doggone expensive while competitors were charging about 1.6% of SBC's rate. She replied that calls to mobile phones would always be higher, and asked if I would care to order SBC's international calling plan? Just $3.99 per month would set me up with per-minute rates of eight cents to Israel. (Of course, calls to mobile phones would be higher, though she could never tell me precisely how much higher.)
I asked if I could order the $3.99 international calling plan and make it retroactive to the invoice I clenched in my hand. She put me on hold.
After a few minutes of listening to a jazz singer croon about how much she loved me (was that an omen?) while on hold, Vanessa returned and said she couldn't turn back the clock. To be sure, the thought of SBC granting that request is preposterous, but I had to ask. It was merely a starting point in my quest for some kind of relief. I wasn't looking for absolution of responsibility for these ten calls, just a rate approaching reasonableness. In a competitive marketplace where eight to thirteen cents per minute is the norm, thirty cents a minute for occasional use would have been reasonable. Fifty cents would have been reasonable. Heck, a buck would have been reasonable. But $4.94 per minute?
Vanessa put me on hold again. By this point I had brought up SBC's website and found the details of the $3.99 international calling plan. Sure enough, eight cents per minute to Israel. I also found a huge PDF listing "default" international long distance rates. After a lot of scrolling, I found a number I was intimately familiar with: $4.94 per minute during peak hours ($3.34 off-peak). The sinking feeling in my gut reflected the realization that I was pretty much screwed.
Vanessa was utterly powerless to do anything but sell me a new plan. She put me on hold for the third time.
Pearl came on the line, identifying herself as the floor supervisor. Where Vanessa was uncertain, Pearl was firm. Both ladies were polite, and seemed sympathetic, superficially at least, but neither was going to budge one penny on these calls, not even an offer to wipe off the six uncompleted attempts. I was going to have to pay this invoice, in full.
This is the part I don't understand. As little as five or ten years ago, the local phone company really had no effective competition. They could pretty much do whatever they wanted to the market. Cell phones have changed that. I've got friends who have no landline phone in their homes; they solely use their cell phones. I reasoned this is why SBC so actively courted my business a couple years ago. Management there probably saw the writing on the wall, so they desperately worked to keep their remaining customer base happy.
Today there are even more choices in telephony. Nowadays you can hook up a device to your broadband internet connection that lets you make telephone calls. Cable companies themselves are selling local telephone service. As these upstarts gain momentum, I can only imagine the intense pressure put on the local telephone companies. This probably isn't a good time to be an SBC employee.
So I played the last card in my hand, the "I really don't want to switch to another provider" gambit. Pearl said I was certainly free to do that, but that I'd still have to pay the $625 invoice. She transferred me to a humorless woman in their accounts receivable department who set up a rigid payment plan: 50% to be paid this week, the balance in the middle of next month. It was an utter defeat for me.
True to my word, I switched. It was easy. It was liberating.
I'm literally amazed at the thought the Vonage team put into their service. Even though we haven't even yet received our cable phone adapter, I'm already stunned by the goodies they provide. For $25 a month, I'll be getting unlimited calling anywhere in the US and Canada, call waiting, caller ID, call forwarding, voicemail (with email notification) and a whole raft of other neat things. Calls to daughter's boyfriend will be no more than 13 cents per minute. Plus, our family gets to keep our current phone number. And it's all because SBC wouldn't budge one penny on my invoice.
SBC will get my $625, and probably another $50 or so for the current month. After that, my relationship with SBC will be forever severed. From here on out, our family will begin enjoying far more service at a monthly rate about half of what SBC charged us.
Tonight I spoke with our daughter about the whole situation. She takes responsibility for the calls she made and will pay them off over time -- a real credit to her integrity. I told her that Vonage has a deal where if any of my friends becomes a Vonage customer based on my referral, I get a free month of service (they get their first month free, too). I told daughter that if any of my friends did sign up, I'd give her $25 to help ease her current debt to us. After all, she's a full-time college student who needs to worry more about school than how she's going to tackle this one.
If you're interested in Vonage, or if you'd like to comment on this rant, please email me. Thank you.
Update, 2007: SBC morphed into AT&T since this original rant was written. Mrs. Yuhas maintains an AT&T/SBC landline for her business; she can tell you how cranky they get if our payment is received a day late. Overall, we've been happy Vonage users for over a year and a half now. Daughter spent a semester in the UK, and every Vonage call to her was free.