3 - How rubbish are they????????? Robots!!!

bassmanuk

Am very angry and upset at the moment.
I had £35 worth of directory enquiries on my bill this month, despite me not having called them ever - not even once in my 18 months of being with 3.
I phoned and complained, and they said they would look into it. Got a phone call back today and they said "Our billing dept say the calls were made from your handset, so they are valid charges"
So basically, this company is calling me a liar!!! I pointed out that I am a teacher, and at the time the calls were made I was in front of a class, and couldn't possible have made them, to which the reply was "Maybe you gave the phone to a friend and they made the calls from your phone and didn't tell you!" I told the guy that unless i had friends hiding in my trouser pockets then they couldn't have been made like that. I asked to speak to someone of a higher status and a woman called me back and said that I had the numbers 'hardwired' into the phone and they had been made that way. I told her that this was a lie too, as I had deleted those numbers from the sim when the contract started back in 2005. She then said that the billing dept had looked into it and the calls were made from my phone. This meant we were going round and round in circles!!

Do 3 customer services actually have brains of their own because they don't care about anything, just repeat themselves to death, you can't argue with them!
They didn't care that i was going to cancel a DD for them (not that they should, but they didn't even flinch when I said it).

Does anyone else know how to deal with these as I have £35 of unfair charges which they say are fair and I now have nowhere else to argue.

Any tips?

C_Ronaldo

id have a word with ofcom,

Astaroth

If you look at it from their perspective though what are the options:

1) Calls have been made from your phone either by you or someone else - could you have left the phone in the class room whilst out the room and some of your pupils used it?

2) The account has been cloned - would however be odd that a person with a cloned phone would only ever use it to call directory enquiries

3) A major systems problem that means it is not identifying the originator of the call correctly - again odd that it is only affecting one number and two you would expect thousands of people to be calling saying they have unrecognised calls

Given the above options, if you were a call centre person which would you suspect is the most likely? (honest answers only)

When I worked in BT billing we got hundreds of calls a month from people saying they didnt recognise a number. As reverse lookups are not allowed all we could say is that it was a residential/ commercial number. A fair percentage of people would then call back and say they have run the number and it has turned out to be their local pizza place or such.... of cause the irony was that next month/ quarter they called back again to say there was a number they didnt recognise which was the same number again but this time from their "test" call

If you are not satisfied with their response you need to look at their complaints procedure and if still not satisfied then as C_Ronaldo says there is OfCom to escalate it to afterwards.

rosysparkle

I know this sounds daft, but is it possible that the phone wasn't locked when it was in your pocket, and the calls were made that way? I have a friend who works for the AA and she tells me they get hundreds of calls from phones that have dialled themselves while in a pocket or a bag.