Most companies are usually pretty good about refunding customers for mistaken charges. It’s a common philosophy, and just common sense, that you shouldn’t have to pay for something you don’t use. Utility bills are based on usage. Cable bills are set according to what features you choose, or how many channels you want access to. Sure, you can only watch one channel at a time, but you get the convenience of channels being available anytime you do get the urge to watch them. Cell phone bills are similar. You pay for calling plans and features, whether you use them all the time or not. For example, you probably a set fee every month to be able to send and receive a certain number of text messages. If you don’t hit that limit, it doesn’t matter—you’re still charged the same amount. But what happens when you find a charge on your bill for a feature that you not only have never used, but couldn’t use because it’s not even supported by your phone? One AT&T customer found out the hard way.
Dong Ngo is an editor and writer at CNET.com. He’s also an AT&T customer, and has been for a long time. He uses an iPhone, and recently noticed an increase in the automatic monthly payment he has set up with the carrier. He called to inquire about it, and while the customer service representative was taking care of that problem, Ngo found another one. He scrolled through his itemized bill and found a charge for $9.99 for MobileTV. The problem is, MobileTV is only available on certain AT&T smartphones, and the iPhone isn’t one of them.
At the time the feature was added to his account in May 2008, Ngo had a smartphone that does support it. He switched to the iPhone in August 2008. So for the last 17 months, he’s been paying for a service he’s never used, and for 13 of those months, it was impossible for him to use it.
Ngo asked for a refund for the time during which he was technically—and technologically—unable to use it, and was told that AT&T’s policy is to refund only up to three months’ worth of charges for any feature being removed from a calling plan. Ngo has yet to locate this policy in any of the company’s literature, and AT&T hasn’t responded to his request for comment on the situation.
What Ngo has the biggest problem with, he says, is that at the same time AT&T reps were changing his calling plan to accommodate his move to first the iPhone 3G, and then the iPhone 3GS, no one mentioned to him that there was something on his bill that shouldn’t be there.
Another part of the problem I see is that it seems once Ngo set up the automatic monthly payment, he stopped paying attention to his bill, simply expecting it to be correct every month. That would be nice, but how many times have we all been incorrectly billed for something? And how many times was it due to an error on the company’s part? Pretty often, I’d wager.
But the fact remains that we’re each responsible for our bills and keeping track of what we’re paying for. In an ideal world, a rep from AT&T, or any other carrier, would call you up any time they noticed something amiss on your bill. But figure the odds of that happening. Yes, the company does have a responsibility to bill fairly, but they also have millions of bills to keep track of. You, like Mr. Ngo, most likely only have one.
What do you think? Should AT&T have refunded Mr. Ngo for all 13 months he’s had the iPhone and couldn’t use the MobileTV service? Or should he be glad he caught the error when he did and was refunded for the last three months?
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