Customer sends bill to phone company for wasting time!

[amish]

Victory: Customer Bills Phone Company For Time Wasted, Gets Paid

... Howard was keeping a record of the time he spent dealing with the phone company (One Communications of Rochester, NY) ...

... Howard tallied up the expenses and sent One Communications a bill. For $5,481.16. And the company agreed to pay it. ...


I think $5.5k bill was less (and too honest!) and hence company paid him up easily.

 

[vebk]

$5.5K is less? For like a couple of months delay? What do you think he should get? $1 million?

 

[amish]

He cud have claimed mental harassment and made claim higher.

 

[rachit_1804]

$ 5.5k is way too modest & no doubt thats the reason why it got cleared.the company might have thought that it would be cheaper to pay off 5.5k than to get into legal hassles if the complainant filed a lawsuit if he was not compensated

 

[Sushubh]

exactly. a lawsuit like this could have set a precedence which could have become a major hassle for any service provider in the country.

 

[vebk]

Well we can speculate why the telephone company agreed to pay the amount - perhaps there were some genuinely concerned people in the management who were keen on making amends. Perhaps they wished to avoid further bad press, and instead make best of a bad situation. Perhaps they wished to avoid litigation.I personally think what he got was sufficient compensation.

 

---

[Sushubh]

the question is whether this would result in more headaches for the same company

 

[vebk]

Well from whatever I have seen so far, companies do not honour precedents as much as courts do. On courts it is binding.But with companies one has to scream, shout and fight for your compensation. And then they won't give the same compensation to another customer unless he as well screams, shouts and fights equally.

 

[Sushubh]

now that the company's name is public. they might get more customers demanding a similar treatment. it's unlikely that the company won't have other customers who face problems... and they now know how to get into news. blogs like consumerists is any company's nightmare.

 

[vebk]

I would hope so too. But the sad reality is that it is news the first time, the second time, maybe the third time. But by the fourth time, the media is not interested. It's stale.

And IMHO many companies in the IT / Telecom sector worldwide are not very people-friendly in that sense. e.g. I got some compensation in the form of free goodies from Dell when they delayed my order of a LCD monitor by almost a month. But that came after a lot of fighting, culminating in my almost sending them a legal notice (it was prepared, just needed to be signed). But my problem got thankfully sorted. But when I e-mailed the same guy (Customer care head no less) about another person who had approached me with a similar problem with Dell, and requested that they look into his case and extend similar courtesy to him, their response was (and I am NOT joking), Dear Mr xxxxx,

Lets not do this.

Regards,
xxxxxxx
:S

So call me jaded, but I don't think an isolated incident of exceptional treatment towards ONE customer is a sign of any new trend.