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What Inept Billing Software Have You Encountered?
Chris asks: "I am a Sprint customer signed up for automatic payments, and over the past week I've found that Sprint has a computer system that does three ridiculously inept things from a programmers standpoint. First, they send a 'Do not send payment...this amount will be charged' bill then a 'Disconnection Imminent' notice for the same amount, within a week of each other. When customer service is called about this, everything appears fine to the customer service rep, and they assure the client that everything is fine. Finally, the computer system shuts down the customer's cell phone for lack of payment, even if the customer has a credit card on file and has given Sprint authorization to use it. What's the worst experience Slashdot users have found with billing systems that don't make any sense?"
I had an account with a small local company and due to a payment / full refund I ended up owing them nothing however their billing system didn't accept that so they sent me a bill for £0.00. So I ignored it until I got a nasty gram saying they were taking me to court for literally nothing. Despite repeated rings they still said that I had a balance. I ended up sending a cheque for £0.00 and then heard nothing more on it..
Cheap UK and US VPS
What do you think they make more money from, you paying your bill on time, or you paying your bill plus a reconnection fee?
Take a look at credit card company websites, if you're paying online, both of the ones I've used make you jump through extra hoops to reschedule your payment to transfer now instead of at the last second before the due date (that many more days of interest, plus the chance that something goes wrong at the last second, and bam! Late fees!).
If I have been able to see further than others, it is because I bought a pair of binoculars.
I've seen Excel being used as a billing system before.
:)
It was a resourceful effort for a family owned business with a "smart teen", but it goes against my beliefs that Excel should be used only for number analysis, not data management. A billing system is data management.
Excuse me now, while I get back to my VHS tape collection worksheet.
I had a worse experience with Web.com's (used to be Interland.com) billing system. When my account came up for renewal, my credit card on file was declined. (Never signed up for auto-renew, anyway.) After getting a couple of automated email messages about it, I entered a new credit card number.
A week later, I still get phone calls at all hours of the night from some automated system identifying itself with an 800 number only. Some of these calls were between 3 and 4 in the morning. I assume the didn't check time zones.
A call with customer service (at the 800 number) went well -- they apologized and cleared my "support ticket" and said everything was paid up. The next night, I got another call.
Instead of screaming at customer service, I have started filing complaints.
My recent favorite is Comcast. I got a bill stating that as of Sep 25th my account was overdue and would I please pay for two months? After checking around my accounts I found that yes in fact, I had paid them and they cashed the check on the 10th or so. After calling the customer service rep I determined that the billing department must be getting their data in advance, and that little 'as of the ________' line just sounded good. No real meaning.
I had a similar experience with AT&T Wireless when I changed my phone number to a new area code. They tried to charge me like I had two different phones, and when I called to correct them they charged me a $300 fee for early closure of the first account. Then, I got really mad and cancelled the new-area-code account also (another $300 fee). It was a nightmare dealing with those customer service people.
The whole experience made me so mad I quit my programming job and enrolled in law school. After my first semester classes, I sued them in small claims court. Of course, they promptly agreed to remove all the charges and fees in exchange for dismissing the lawsuit.
I guess that means I am stubborn, $60k in tuition just to get out of a $600 phone bill.
"If you think you have things under control, you're not going fast enough." --Mario Andretti
I used to have a Sprint phone. I had electronic billing. I haven't had a Sprint phone for 3 years, but I still get an email every month helpfully letting me know that my SPrint bill is ready online. I've called Customer Service and they have said there is nothing they can do about it. Good thing for procmail.
Spencer Ogden
Back when I worked at the callcenter for Sirius Satellite Radio, we used a web based solution called TimelyBill. It was absolutely terrible. I was one of the senior agents, that is we took calls from agents on the floor who needed help (or had a customer asking for a supervisor) and also ran the local intranet knowledgebase site. Half of the site was devoted to helping agents understand the software.
Ultimately, I was fired from the callcenter partially because of the way that the billing software worked. The service that they (Sirius) wanted us to push were the annual plans, which the customer could save a bit of money on in the long haul, but the terms dictated that the annual plans had a $75 cancellation fee. I'm sure if there are any Sirius customers that have been around for a while that read this, you probably know all about it. It worked like this:
1.) Customer calls to activate a satellite receiver of some kind, chooses annual plan to save a few bucks. Cost is about $143 bucks, at the time.
2.) Customer uses the service for a few months, and then something happens to the radio, I.E it breaks, it gets stolen, the customer decides to upgrade to a new radio.
3.) Customer calls in to the callcenter to inform us of the change in receiver, so they can get their plan transferred to the new unit.
4.) Agent stops the service on the new unit. Now, this is where the magic happens. If the agent is seasoned, and knows what they are doing (or, just plain gives a shit) they remember to credit the account for the $75 cancellation fee. The old service is terminated by TimelyBill. If the customer used the service for, let's say 6 months, they end up with a credit on their account for un-used service, about $70 bucks.
5.) TimelyBill waits until the customer's billing cycle date (the day of the month that they activated in) to make any adjustments to the account. On that date, the customer's account would be debited for a NEW annual plan $143 bucks, which collided with the credit for $70. The customer's credit card would be charged again, for the diffrence, about $70 bucks.
6.) Customer calls back. "What the fuck are you charging me for?" Asks for a supervisor.
7.) Senior agent spends, on average 30 minutes attempting to explain to the customer what the system did, with usually around a 30% acceptance rate. The other 70% of the time, the customer becomes infuriated, doesn't understand, and usually screams a few cuss words or an insult, and hangs up. I actually had a customer one time ask where we were located. When I told him we lived in New York, he proceeded to tell me "No wonder the terrorists attack you assholes, you all deserve to die. Im happy they keep choosing you."
8.) Customer (in my case) writes a letter to the corporate office, insisting something be done about the terrible supervisor who handled his call.
So, in my case, terrible software can actually cause you, even though you are not directly responsible for it, to loose your job. Especially with a company like Sirius, who at the time that I worked for their callcenter, was a fairly new company, and hadn't really set their policies in stone, so everything was always changing. We went back and forth several times about the billing system, and wether or not the customers should be refunded anything, and even if they should be given back cancellation fees when they cancelled. When in doubt, I guess, fire a peon.
Anyway, moral of the story: Avoid TimelyBill (OmniOSS).
Windows has more viruses because linux has more virus coders.
I had cancelled my Dish Network system and switched to Time Warner in March of 2005. The lady at Dish Network told me my account was cancelled. Fast forward 9 months later and I started receiving small bills every month. I went on the website and used their email support to ask what the deal was. No reply. I got another bill. I emailed. No reply. Finally, I ended up owing them $90. I told them there was no way I was going to pay it. Turns out they had just put my account "on hold" and then reactivated it after a certain amount of time.
I sent them 3 emails and got absolutely no response from their support. I should have picked up the phone but hey, when people put up email support I use it so I don't have to waste 30 minutes to an hour on the phone. They took me to collections and the dink to my credit was worth it to just not pay the money they tried to extort from me.
I was a Dish Network customer for 2.5 years and paid them thousands of dollars. I should have known better than to think those thousands of dollars would be put into having support people that answered their email. I will never pay Dish another dime as long as I live. Long live Direct TV.
Bell Canada's OneBill system takes the prize in my book. The idea is that the phone company gives you one bill for all of the services provided by their various sub-companies, i.e. television (ExpressVu), local phone, long distance, and internet (Sympatico).
The problem is "OneBill" is actually a separate company, which means that in order to send the bills on time they have to get the billing information so far in advance that bill payments, and credits, don't appear until the NEXT bill.
For example, ExpressVu was charging me for a PPV movie even though I had a credit for $50 of free PPV for signing up with them. Problem is, the credit wasn't being applied correctly, so when I received my bill it said there was a $5 charge for PPV. So I called ExpressVu and they credited my account, except that they aren't scheduled to send an update to OneBill for 30 days, so the credit doesn't reflect in my OneBill balance, and consequently if I don't pay the amount it says I owe I will be penalized and charged interest (and, theoretically, risk disconnection of service).
Not only that, but the system is even dumber when it comes to disconnecting features you don't want. I didn't want to pay for the movie channels that I'd had for free since joining (as a promotion), and I was told to give 30 days notice to terminate them. I called 32 days before my trial was up and explained that I didn't want the channels after the trial ended. So far so good. Well, I receieved my bill for the month after the trial (remember, TV service is paid in advance) and there was a charge for the movie channels. Even though my service was disconnected on time. So I called the OneBill people and they fixed my bill. But on the NEXT bill ExpressVu ALSO fixed my bill, so I got credited twice. Later on when speaking to a rep about the PPV problem, they explained that in their system, the "stop collecting the fee for Services" message isn't sent to OneBill until the service is disconnected, but the service isn't disconnected until the day it's supposed to be, except OneBill sent that bill out already, because they get their updates 30 days in advance. Dumbest thing ever. Needless to say, I never got around to calling them telling them of their second mistake in the billing.
You've obviously never seen The Daily WTF. I wouldn't touch that software with a 10-foot pole controlled 10,000 miles away through a SSH connection.
http://outcampaign.org/
Never. Let. Them. Get. At. Your. Money.
Push not pull: If automatic withdrawal or credit card billing is optional, do not opt in. If you don't want to deal with manual payment, you can setup your own transaction to send them a payment automatically.
Minimize the liability: If they insist on 'pull' transactions, opt for credit card billing, using an expendable credit card with a very low credit limit i.e. less than $500.
Paper billing: You can't accidentaly lose paper to a drive failure or virus/malware. Tangible stuff with big yellow highlighter that says "PAY ME" is easy to see on a kitchen fridge.
In fact, I have. I work for a company (name withheld on purpose, since I'm gonna slam our competition and some former employees) that makes billing software for ISP's and other telecom service companies (including phone companies).
And I would just like to take a moment to back up your assertion that it's not simple. Not in the least.
Also, more on the topic at hand (Sprint's crappy billing system), I would like to point out that they buy that system from Amdocs. We've hired several ex-Amdocs people in the last year (their local office imploded and dumped a bunch of workers into the job market) and we've fired them all (except for one guy who quit). They've been nearly universally incompetent, so it doesn't surprise me that the software is crap. Our system isn't all rosy, but it was actually getting worse under the direction of the ex-Amdocs guys.
Repeated phone calls to the company got him nowhere (which just goes to show we have no need to out-source customer service since we are perfectly capable of providing terrible customer service domestically). Back in those days the billing systems were just getting computerized which was why this mistake was made and also why this man was having a hard time getting his problem solved.
Back in those days the companies actually sent all of their customers a punched card in each monthly statement and the customers were supposed to send this card back with their payment. Well, this man knew all about punched cards since he was in charge of several computers that still used them. So he simply punched in an end-of-file on a blank card and sent that back instead of the card the company sent him.
A couple of weeks later he got a phone call from the company asking him what he did and why he did it. He explained and they said they would correct the problem as long as he promised not to tell anyone else about the trick he had pulled.
We don't see the world as it is, we see it as we are.
-- Anais Nin
And by the way, have you ever tried to write a phone billing system? There's a lot more to it than meets the eye.
Were you a business strategist for Microsoft?
Just because something is difficult, that's no excuse for not getting it right before unleashing it upon the world.
Moderator hint: a comment is neither "Flamebait" nor "Troll" if it is true.
1) When we went to purchase our first home, the credit report showed my wife in default on her student loans, despite her being in grad school and having a deferal. The bank holding the loan claimed that they had been unable to contact her for over a year, despite using "all resources at their command." When we asked why she was still getting her checking account statements at the apartment we had been in for over a year, the until then surly manager sat in stunned silence, looking a bit ill. He pulled up her checking account information, and saw that it had our current address. When I pointed out that their customer files might be considered a primary resource at their command, he had to agree. The next morning, the correction had been made to our Credit report. That bank has since gone out of business.
2) Several years later, my wife and I separated for awhile. I called the Cable company, and had my service moved to my new place, and told my wife that she should contact them to have her service moved into her name. The cable came up at my place, and I never thought about it again. A few months later, we reconciled, and I moved back into our house. She paid the bills that had been moved to her name, I paid the others. About a year later, I decided to move from dial-up internet access to a cable modem. I called and asked the Cable company to add broadband service. "Would you like to reactivate your TV cable service at the same time?" Huh? We already have cable, just add the broadband. "Well... I'll have someone contact you about adding that."
The next day, a cable supervisor shows up at the door, and launches into this long lecture about Cable piracy and how we were in "big trouble." Eventually, I demand they show when they disconnected the cable when they transferred the service to my new place. They, of course, discover that there was never a work order issued to disconnect the old service. Since my wife had never seen a cable bill, and I hadn't been expecting to pay one after I moved back in, we had never realized they were not billing us. Of course, we then get a bill for the 18 months, which I refuse to pay since I had canceled service for that address. Eventually, they relented and cancelled the bill when I mentioned Satellite TV.
Modernbill is most definitely the worst billing software out there. I'm amazed at the amount of people who use it.
mstyne: real name, no gimmicks