A friend of mine asked me for some help as she was having trouble getting an issue with her phone service sorted out.
She has a business, and had a 1-800 number that was a service from Primus.
She had another local number that was also for business, and that was with another carrier, who I believe she was reasonably happy with, but maybe not.
Anyway, some bright spark sales moron representing the Primus Canada company phoned her and suggested that she get both phone services from Primus Canada.
She went ahead after a little discussion, and assumed all was set up as  agreed.
THEN SHE RECEIVED HER BILL!
The idiot at Primus had fouled up, and set up the local number as a residential number, not a business number. Now, I don't know the exact chronology of the whole thing, but she has phoned Primus Customer Care more than once. She has had the supervisor there agree that her service was incorrectly set up. She has had them agree that they will get it set up correctly.
She waited for the billing adjustment, and what does she get instead? More residential billing, plus a threatening letter about collection.
So she asked for my help, and I thought it better to do it in writing so we are sure that the communication is correctly understood by all parties.
I sent them an email TWO DAYS AGO. I get the autoresponse, you know, we value you as a customer, etc etc. And we are experiencing longer than usual response times due to high volumes.

I have an idea as to why they might be behind:
They fail to do things correctly.
They fail to acknowledge their error until after the customer has repeatedly called.
They say they will fix the error and don't.
They generate additional errors by allowing long time lapses, causing billing to go to collection.
And finally, from my own experience, they cannot even answer the simplest of questions.

The question that I posed, and that I require an answer to before we proceed any further is not an earth-shattering piece of calculus, it was as follows:

As an initial move, Ms XXXXXX would like to know if you are prepared 
to look further into this matter with a view to achieving resolution. 
A simple yes or no. You are either prepared to fix this error that 
Primus Sales has created, or you are not. And if it is the case that 
you are not, then we can presumably save a lot of words if you say so 
asap.

And I have nothing in return. Two days. You have to admire them for lack of caring.
They have invaded their own customers peace, created a problem, refused to acknowledge it until after multiple calls, then they have failed, failed failed , failed FAILED FAILED FAILED.

They would have been ahead of the game if they had just left her alone.
If I try to call, the wait times are listed as over 15 minutes. I just don't want to be waiting holding for these incompetents for that long.
I believe she might be ahead of things by cancelling service, and getting another carrier to take the business, and then taking Primus to Small Claims Court ASAP to recover her lost money and force them to correctly re-bill her. At least that way she would 'freeze' the error and prevent them from adding more errors to the situation.

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