Qwest Customers Receive Bills They Didn’t Bargain For

It was a midsummer of odd glitches for Qwest Communications International. A coding error during a billing system upgrade left thousands of wireless customers with astronomical bills; other Qwest subscribers were charged for Internet services they never signed up for; and one customer was stuck with 853 phone bills.

In late July, some 14,000 Qwest wireless users were overbilled thousands of dollars—in some cases tens of thousands of dollars. Charges swelled to a staggering $600 a minute after some customers had exhausted their allotted buckets of minutes. Linda Brooks of Minneapolis told the Associated Press that she opened her mail and found a statement for $57,346.20, more than she earned in a year.

The charging errors occurred as a result of the June upgrade of Qwest’s billing system, says spokeswoman Barbara Faulhaber. The faulty statements represented about 1 percent of Qwest’s wireless customers in 12 states. As compensation, amounts on June bills received unusual adjustments: Customers with set plans were charged just June’s fee for their buckets of minutes, Faulhaber says, not for any additional time.

Qwest learned of the problem after it mailed slightly more than 1 percent of June’s statements, and Faulhaber says the company corrected the mistake before mailing out the rest of the notices.

Also in June, 250 Qwest wireless customers in the Midwest were charged for Internet service they never ordered. Most of the customers were incorrectly billed an extra $8 a month for two months for Qwest’s Browse Now wireless Internet access.

The error occurred when Qwest’s provisioning system was out of synch with its billing system, also attributed to the software upgrade, Faulhaber says.

A Browse Now promo that began in February actually ended June 6, “and when our product catalog system did not read what the customer call handlers were putting in, this is where the provisioning and the billing system did not synch up,” she says.

The root of the glitches was a coding problem that happened during the upgrade, says Carey Brandt, a Qwest spokeswoman. “They were able to pull out the problem and get the coding fixed,” she says. It was the “same general root cause for both problems, with different results.”

To avoid such problems in the future, Brandt says, Qwest has beefed up its validation process. “We had validation pieces in place, both manual and automated, throughout our billing system,” she says. “We’ve upped that to basically triple the validation checkpoints along the process.”

Several weeks earlier, it was just one customer that gave Qwest a massive billing headache.

The telecom giant spared no expense in dogged pursuit of Shannon Erb’s overdue $75 phone bill, bombarding the Washington state woman with more than 850 notices in three days, at a postage tab of $270.

Company spokesman Michael Dunne notes that although there had been significant contact between Qwest and Erb on the $75 contested debt, the 853 bills were “a lot more than would normally be generated by our collections department.”

The bills arrived at the woman’s home, in the appropriately named town of Battle Ground, during three days in June. The postal carrier refused to drop the huge stack of mail at her address, so she had to pick them up at the post office.

Erb claims to have had a three-year struggle with the phone company about the $75 charge. She says her disputes go back to 1998, before Qwest acquired US West. Charges would appear on her bill for calls she never made, Erb says. She would call to complain, and the phone company promised to follow up or issue credits.

But Erb said Qwest never followed up, the charges never disappeared, and the credits never showed up. So when each month’s bill arrived, Erb would simply deduct the amount she didn’t think she owed and pay the rest. Qwest cut off Erb’s phone service earlier this year for not paying the $75. However, Dunne says the company-reinstated service in July, while it continued to try and pin down Erb’s complaint.

Qwest decided to send Erb copies of her bill from the past three years so she could identify exactly which charges she was disputing. Dunne was incredulous when he heard in July that 853 bills showed up, not 36.

So was it a system or a human error? “It was,” Dunne says, “a human error on a system.”