The following are issues and recommended actions that community members desire to put to you for your consideration. If they move you to act, please do so. If you differ with what is expressed, feel free to open issues for debate and/or submit your own entry for consideration. Where possible keep focused on expressing your understanding of an issue rather than attacking what others express. Trust that the members of our community have enough understanding and intelligence to evaluate what is expressed, feel what their hearts/souls tell them, and act accordingly. Just express yourself clearly and let your information flow from your heart. Those who are meant to hear will indeed hear and be moved to act.
New submissions should include:
I had an interesting experience this month (actually it is still in progress) with a company that clearly does not understand what CUSTOMER SERVICE means. In my particular case, the symptoms of the problem are wasted time getting to customer service, loss of long distance telephone service for over two weeks, and refusal by customer service of dealing with the matter at all ... much less in any sort of a timely matter.
I find the way MCI has treated me, and is treating others, COMPLETELY UNACCEPTABLE. And, I believe that by making people aware of the way MCI does business as a volunteer consumer advocate, I empower myself to act in a manner that forces MCI to deal with the REAL problems in how they are treating all their customers.
Anyway see Denial of Long Distance Service for details. But beware, seeing how MCI is choosing to handle this has had me ROFL a few times already. I've known for awhile that many companies simply don't care. But, this is far worse than I had ever imagined.
As an individual customer or FORMER CUSTOMER (if they ever fix my long distance service anyway), I've done what I can do. BTW: I do realize that if all I wanted was long distance service again, calling Sprint, choosing to make them my long distance service provider, and paying the $3.50 or so charge for changing the connection would have me connected within 24 hours. If this is so EASY for me to do ... then WHY is it "IMPOSSIBLE" for MCI to restore my service to where it was before MCI screwed it up?
However, this would not hold MCI responsible for what THEY HAVE DONE and this would not cause MCI to make any changes to assure this does not happen to other, or to make sure they handle such a problem better in the future. At this point, I choose freely invest my time and energies in a manner that makes a difference for others. I have already decided personally to NEVER do business with MCI again.
Earlier, I was saying that I have done about as much as I can do. Here is where the strength of working together comes in. Alone, no matter how many complaints I send in, I am a single individual and my voice has limited weight. However, if you are moved enough by this to join me and take action and get involved, then the strength of my complaint goes up exponentially. The bottom line to companies is profits ... if they see that they will lose business and hence profits unless they act and take care of the problems, then they will indeed do so.
To make this easy for you, I've composed a basic message below and created a mailto:MCI link following that. If you select the text below, and do an edit|copy, then click on the maito:MCI and paste the message into the e-mail, then click send ... you will have added your voice to mine. Feel free to tailor and/or add to the message in any way you'd like.
I agree with Wayne. MCI's treatment of customers is UNACCEPTABLE. Clearly it is time for you to FIX your PROBLEMS so that more of your customers are not subjected to such "inconvenience".
Details of this situation can be found at www.redshift.com/~beyond/longdist.htm
Perhaps before anyone agrees to "TRY MCI", they should get MCI to agree to (1) reimburse them 50 cents per hour for any loss of service resulting from actions taken to implement "TRY MCI", and (2) reimburse them $1 per minute for each minute over two minutes that they spend waiting on hold for customer service.
If MCI is not willing to back their "SERVICES" in such a manner, perhaps NO ONE should be willing to "TRY MCI". It is simply NOT WORTH IT.
Note that there was nothing about my approach to this problem that makes it unique to this situation. This is an example of the type of action you too can take. Use e-mail so that you have a dated record of all correspondence. Posting the record of the situation on a web page is easy and cheap. Once there, the focus can be changed to making people aware. All it takes is an e-mail in many cases with the URL so that the person or organization can go to the specific page for the details. Also, as I've done above, you can make it easy for people to get involved and take action. As consumers, our power comes from our numbers. Companies will be forced to take notice when WE choose to band together and speak with a common voice.
That is exactly what this section is here to assist with. If you are aware of situation/problems that can benefit from community awareness and involvement, please submit them.