TSTT... doh call them first!

I am appalled by the audacity of TSTT. This company has done it again. In response to my column “Bold Face People,” they have continued to make excuses for their lack of proper service. When a teacher read the letter that TSTT sent to Newsday (printed in the Letters to the Editor section), she said it sounded like a poor excuse a parent would write when a child was absent from school. Example:

“Dear Miss,
       John could not attend school yesterday because he was ill.” Upon examining the roll book, she realised that it was John’s birthday and his neighbour told her John went to shop. In the same way, TSTT is making excuses. Therefore, I now give my response to TSTT’s response. Ahem... First of all, the points that I raised in my column were not problems that only I experienced. Newsday is the people’s newspaper and whenever I write, I write on behalf of the people, especially those who do not have a voice. To justify my point and to see if I was really wrong, I took it upon myself to do a survey (since I am quite open to criticism). After speaking to people from different areas of Trinidad, the result was that all shared the same view I had about TSTT.

Because they have a monopoly, they think they can take advantage of the people who do not have the power to stand up to them. They think they can do what they want, when they want. Their GSM Network (which I’ve nicknamed Generating Serious Malfunctions) can “give trouble” at anytime. If there is a problem with your residential line, months can go by before you get it repaired ... unless you “know somebody” or “are somebody.” Thanks to TSTT, people cannot be “in touch” with their family and friends as they would like to be. One woman called in with her plight (thank the Lord her phone worked for once). She lives alone and her son is out at sea most of the time and has to call her from the ship to check on her every now and then. The problem is, he is always immediately put on to her voicemail. This woman would like to speak to her son personally! Can TSTT get her phone to work properly?

Another woman told me about her experience when she went to query her bill. After waiting some two hours, she was sent to a customer service representative. After telling the representative about her problem the representative displayed her account on the screen and told her, “Our system shows that you did in fact make those foreign calls.” To which the woman replied, “But I did not make them.”

Sales representative: “Well, I’m sorry ma’am, but this is what our system shows.”

Woman: “But I didn’t make those calls. This is what I’ve come to query.”

Sales Representative: “Well, you probably dialled the wrong number and someone answered.”

(Excuse me?) And that is how the “investigation” went, until its eventual conclusion, which was that the woman had to pay the entire bill, for calls she actually made and for calls she was accused of making, but had not made. It is quite ironic that in their response to my column they said: “ ...it is TSTT’s policy to thoroughly investigate all customer claims of erroneous billing. If the results are in any way inconclusive, the customer is given the benefit of the doubt and the charges are removed from their account.” So why wasn’t the woman’s charges removed? I can put my head on a block and say that customers are NEVER given the benefit of the doubt. In addition, people don’t want the benefit of the doubt, they want their money back!

In response to my experience with crossed lines, TSTT went even further to say “...it could have been illegal use by a third party ...” Can you please tell me who is the third party? No “normal” citizen would know how to open one of those boxes and make calls. Or picture this: my 67-year-old grandmother climbing a ladder to attach a phone to the line. In conclusion, that so called “recently developed free on-line service where customers can securely check the information about current and historical bill details” is not available to everyone. In case you did not realise TSTT, not everyone has access to the Internet. What about the blind? The deaf? The poor? Oh! And what if people actually go on-line and find that calls that they did not make are there?

What is going to happen then? Will you accuse them of making these calls and make them pay for calls to Mexico, Guam or even the Czech Republic? Get real TSTT, almost 99 percent of Trinidad and Tobago complains about your service. When are you going to be more careful in checking people’s usage of your “service?” You have a duty to provide an important service to the people of Trinidad and Tobago, it is about time you do that in a proper way. It is about time you start caring about the people who are your customers and who are paying dollars. And by the way, even your “help” numbers are always busy.