Tired of FLOW’s disservice

Pat Williams Bignall

ON OCTOBER 28, I paid my FLOW bill for my landline – in full – and there were no accumulated arrears. This bill was due on the 29th, so in essence, this was a pre-payment to FLOW.

On the evening of Thursday, November 10, I made a call that was interrupted by a voice message warning of possible disconnection for non-payment. A couple of minutes into the call, my account was disconnected. While I knew I had no outstanding balance, I checked my bill and verified that the payment had been made before calling the company.

The representative I spoke with confirmed that the payment came in on the 28th and advised that the account was not credited until the 31st, hence it was disconnected for late payment.

NO CALL

I took her to task and she sought guidance from the supervisor, who advised her to take my details and she would call me in a few minutes. Well, at the time of writing this letter (November 14), I am yet to receive a call from the supervisor.

I have made three subsequent calls to the company, and the responses ranged from “the credit not yet applied, though we are seeing your payment”, to “there are some issues and someone should have manually activated the payment to your account”.

On all four encounters, I was told that the matter was being escalated. For the third and fourth calls, the escalation moved to ‘high priority’. But up to last evening (my last call), the payment had still not applied.

I was advised that so great is the magnitude of such a problem that the company has created a department to deal solely with adding payments to accounts where the clients paid but did not get the benefit of the payment to their account.

WITHOUT ACCESS

Against the background of the newly established department, an assurance was given to me that within 12 hours of my call, the payment would be applied and I would regain access to my telephone line. It’s almost 20 hours after and I am still without access.

I am really taken aback that the account was disconnected 14 days after the payment was made, even though the system corroborated that the payment had been received.

Is there a body that checks to ensure that the accounts of clients who have already paid are removed from a disconnection list? And, if the company is aware that it has internal issues, shouldn’t disconnections be done only after a thorough investigation that proves, without a shadow of a doubt, that the client has not paid?

I have listened to the experiences of so many of FLOW’s customers, and I am forced to ask: Is FLOW still in the business of serving clients?