Time Warner Cable Forced To Pay $229,500 For Robocalling The Wrong Person...153 Times
from the dysfunction-junction dept
Time Warner Cable continues to be incredibly good at being incredibly bad at what it does. The cable operator already enjoys arguably the worst customer satisfaction ratings of any company in any U.S. industry, below even Comcast. Its horrible customer service is legendary, and things have actually gotten worse as the company has sat on its hands waiting to be sold off to a rotating crop of equally dysfunctional suitors. When you're this bad at what you do, you have to be truly creative in finding new and imaginative ways to annoy your customer base.Time Warner Cable's latest incredible display of ineptitude? The cable giant has been sued for robocalling a woman 153 times regarding an overdue balance. The problem? Time Warner Cable was calling the wrong woman, who ultimately had to file suit against the cable operator to get them to stop annoying her:
"King, of Irving, Texas, accused Time Warner Cable of harassing her by leaving messages for Luiz Perez, who once held her cellphone number, even after she made clear who she was in a seven-minute discussion with a company representative. The calls were made through an "interactive voice response" system meant for customers who were late paying bills."Time Warner Cable is being ordered by the courts to pay Araceli King $229,500 (or $1,500 per call) for violating the Telephone Consumer Protection Act, not a bad payout for the woman having to delete 153 unlistened-to voicemails. The truly amazing part is that Time Warner Cable still managed to robocall the woman an additional 74 times...after the suit was filed:
"He also said 74 of the calls had been placed after King sued in March 2014, and that it was "incredible" to believe Time Warner Cable when it said it still did not know she objected. "Defendant harassed plaintiff with robo-calls until she had to resort to a lawsuit to make the calls stop, and even then TWC could not be bothered to update the information in its IVR system," Hellerstein wrote."That's pretty impressive even for Time Warner Cable's low standards of operational efficiency. Some bad news for Time Warner Cable: the FCC actually just got done making Robocall restrictions a little tougher for violators. Surely Time Warner Cable CEO Rob Marcus, set to potentially make $97 million as an exit package via the upcoming Charter merger, is working tirelessly at making his company much less professionally annoying.
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Filed Under: do not call, robocalls, telemarketing, telephone consumer protection act
Companies: time warner cable
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I wish I could get laid off for that kind of money.
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Re:
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ALMOST unbelievable
Ms. King is my hero for today.
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Re: ALMOST unbelievable
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(On Monday Judge Alvin K. Hellerstein issued a fantastic order scolding copyright troll Malibu Media / XArt.)
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Re: About damn time...
Not a good idea. I work on a system that robocalls parents and students. It is strictly informational but is a huge help to parents and students. It generally only calls to inform parents of their student's skipping classes, late start, early release, snow days and any special events. Occasionally someone will call in and say that they don't have a student and I go in and remove the number. What surprising is it takes me only about 2 minutes to trace and remove a number. That is an expensive 2 minute fix for Time Warner.
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Re: Re: About damn time...
Especially debt collectors. I got my current phone # a few years back. The person who had it before me skipped out on a lot of debt. To this day I get a couple of calls on a daily basis from debt collectors looking for that person. I've never been able to get this problem fixed.
I loathe robocalls.
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I don't know if it's changed since my youngest sibling graduated high school but, somehow I doubt it.
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Re: Re: Re: About damn time...
Ther might be one smigin of hope yet. I have this exact same problem. I've only know of one possible solution I thought I might share w/you. I work as a consumer advocate. When I got these calls, I would call back the collection agency from my cell phone explaining that the number has since been recycled. I give them my name and the one their trying to reach and I direct them to my website where they'll be able to see THAT number with my name. Then I ask the to call THAT number while I remain on my cell phone. As they're able to confirm that it is, in fact, the same person, they'll finally take me off their list. My website doesn't discuss this yet only because I've been unable to axis (modify) ever it since Yahoo became a piece of sh_t and offers no more Customer Service. I'm dumping them real soon. I can elaborate more on that later. If you don't have axis to this method, please email me and we'll figure something out for you. Honestly, I will!!!
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Almost, almost...coulda been poetic justice.
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Re: Almost, almost...coulda been poetic justice.
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I know people who've been called by TWC with sexual harassment, death threats and other nastyness simply because call centre staff are bored and have zero management looking over their shoulders.....
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robo call prevention
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Anybody have a phone number for plantiff's lawyer?
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http://www.lemberglaw.com/
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*ring ring ring*
"Hello, Miss King. We couldn't seem to reach you during normal business hours, so we've added a 2am robo call to the mix. We assume you work 3rd shift seeing as we couldn't reach you."
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Up the Ante
Hope Hizzoner will add the product 74x$1,500 to the existing award.
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That should teach them
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