Jan 3, 2015.

To: Bell Canada, Customer accounts.

From:

Peeter Joot, …. <address>

Account # xxxyyyzzz

Customer ID Number: xxxyyyzzzwww

Re: Disputing billing past cancellation.

To Whom it may concern,

I am writing to dispute the continued billing that I have received from Bell Canada, for services cancelled in August 2014.
Context: Within about a week of moving to a new house on August 12, 2014 I called Bell Canada to arrange for a move of service. Much to my surprise, your company was not willing to retain me as a customer, and I was informed that I would have to pay to move my home phone service to a new location, and was also obligated to accept a new phone number. Neither of these were acceptable, and I told the representative on the phone that I would call back to cancel the service after looking at what non-Bell options were available for home phone. That cancellation was made within a few weeks of my initial call. I do not have the dates for that second call, and the Bell representatives I have talked to tell me that they have lost all records of this second phone call. On that phone call, I was offered additional Bell services for free to attempt to keep me as a customer. A waiver of the move charge, something that makes no sense in this day when you ought to be attempting to retain customers, was also offered at this point. Neither the waiver of the move charge, nor the free services (internet and television related), were of interest at that point since by then I had already had home phone service installed from your competitor Rogers. Had you not required unacceptable move-charges when I initially called to arrange to have the service moved you could have retained me as a customer.

During that second call I was told that not only could you not cancel the service until an effective date of September 30^th, you would also bill me for this additional service, whether I wanted it or not. I was and amazed at the meaningless charges that were imposed on me, but by this time felt that I did not have much choice. You have a corporate policy to extort your customers should they desire to keep using your services, so the fact that you are also willing to impose the same type of extortion on customers that no longer wish to use your services is not surpising.

Most recent payment history:

I have records of having paid the $39.49 home phone bill for August 2014 on Sept 9, 2014, and have records of having paid the ($39.49) bill for the services that should have ended Sept 30, 2014 on October 10, 2014.

Failure to cancel:

The house with the undesired Bell service was due to be sold in early November, and to ensure the new owners did not arrive in the house with a functioning phone service in my name, I contacted Bell through your online contact service on October 28, to ensure that the services had been properly cancelled. I talked to Marianne at that point who stated “I was asking because your home phone service is still showing active on my end. If the people you spoke with are not the Loyalty team then it will be the reason why the cancellation was not process. What needs to be done now is to call 310-BELL (2355) 1-800-668-6878 form 10 am – 9 pm and look for the Loyalty team to process the cancellation. I will note the account regarding what happened so you won’t have to render the 30 days notice anymore. “

It appears that your company lost the cancellation request that I had made. This is the same cancellation request where I was told explicitly by a Bell representative that the service would be cancelled effective September 30 2014.

Your representative Oszman (6028990), a nasty fellow to deal with, full of scorn and impatience, did manage to cancelled the service for real on November 3, effective November 4^th. I was not surprised to find that your company’s claim that services could not be cancelled immediately was a fabrication.

I do not know if the lost cancellation request was made with Bell “Loyalty” or some other Bell customer service division. I understand from others in customer service roles that there are sometimes penalties for representatives that are not able to retain customers by offering incentives. Perhaps my cancellation request was “lost” to avoid such a penalty?

I have no intention of paying any bills from Bell Canada past the bill paid on October 10 2014 for the September service that I did not desire. For the record, I also consider that September bill to be invalid, but have paid it assuming that in some fine print somewhere I had agreed to be victimized by your company should I wish to cancel the service.

Sincerely,

Peeter Joot

A copy of this correspondence will be made publicly available on the internet.