Knowing why carriers use stall tactics when it comes to customer’s billing resolution and how it impacts your business helps you shorten resolution time and save you time and money.

When a service or billing issue occurs with your telecommunication services, it often takes a joint effort of the customer and the carrier to resolve the issue.  However, typically the customer does not take enough initiative to determine the root cause and get involved in the process, but instead, they rely on their carrier’s sales and support staff to find resolution on their own.  Let us dive into some of the reasons that we say that it’s critical for the customer to get involved and help drive the resolution process and to recognize and avoid these carrier stall tactics.

 

The Origin of Carrier Stall Tactics

As a customer, you purchase telecom services from your telecom vendors.  We can all agree that this means that you have made agreements with your telecom providers to provide you with certain services.  And in exchange, you have agreed to pay them monthly for that service.  We refer to this as, They Provide and You Pay.  But what happens when there is a billing issue?  What happens when they don’t provide and make you overpay?  Whose responsibility is it to find these issues and subsequently, who should be the one to resolve the issues?  This is where we start to see more questions than answers.  This is where we start to see what we call, carrier stall tactics come into play.

Allow yourself to drift back to a simpler time.  If you were able to hop into a time machine and go back to the early days when telecom was first being widely used, you would see that people only know telecom services to be phone lines. Plain Old Telephone Service or POTS as we know it today.  You would see that businesses would be thrilled with POTS because they could communicate so much faster than the time it took to send a postage letter or take a horse and buggy to see a customer.  If you were to pick up a phone bill, you’d be amazed at how simple it was.  No features, promotions, or bundles to muddy the waters.  Ok, back to reality – We live in an age so far advanced from those early days of phone service. Data, Video, Global connection in an instant, and everything from wrist watches to soda machines are connected via telecom.  Every feature you can imagine, rates and promotions that change with the wind… Today’s advanced telecom world brings along with it so many advanced services and even more billing issues.  So how do we navigate these waters and ensure that we are getting what we pay for?

 

Billing Resolution as a Stall Tactic

One thing is certain, it is 100% the customer’s responsibility to verify that they are being provided what they are paying for.  This is generally understood, but the complexity of that verification is often under appreciated.  As stated above, the telecom world has become so advanced. Knowing how to verify accurate billing is a constant learning process and takes years of industry experience to truly master.  It requires the most up-to-date knowledge of carrier offerings, promotions, and a true understanding of ways that carriers inflate invoices.  A common and sadly real saying in the industry, is that carrier billing issues are almost never in the favor of the customer.  

So once a billing issue is identified, billing resolution and the time to get resolution is critical.  Each week an issue continues, is one more week that the overcharge is the customer’s financial responsibility and one more week in the rear-view mirror.  The customer will start to weigh the time and effort it is going to take to fix the issue with how much the issue is going  to cost them.  It’s human nature to just want it to go away, and it is in the carriers’ interest to use stall tactics to get the customer to that point.

As time passes, the easier it is for the carrier to brush it under the rug or claim systems have changed and the issue can no longer be researched.  Yes, it can be frustrating, but that’s why it is important to understand how to minimize the time and cost.

 

Prelude Solutions

Prelude offers a solution to these stall tactics and so much more. Prelude Solutions focuses on getting your telecom spending optimized while bringing efficiency to your internal staff to allow them to focus on what they do best.

Skip to content