Have you been crammed or slammed lately? It's not nice

Today I wanted to talk about something fairly common in Telecom, Cramming and Slamming on your Telephone bill. These are two items that, without inspection can cost your company hundreds and thousands of dollars each year.

Slamming is when the long distance provider on one or more of your phone lines is not the provider you chose. Other than the obvious issue of someone doing something that you didn't approve of, slamming can cost you more in rates, fee's and billing type. Let's say your company has 10 phones lines and you chose ABC telecom to be your long distance provider. You chose them because their long distance rate is 5 cents per minute, they don't charge a plan fee's or PICC ( pre-inter exchange carrier charge) fee's and they bill in 6/6 billing increments meaning 6 seconds minimum charge per call and 6 second billing increment. So along comes XYZ telecom and they assign three of your ten numbers to their service. This is done by contacting the local phone company ( through various methods) and requesting that  the PICC code for XYZ telecom be placed on 410-xxx-xxxx and so on. The PICC code is a numbering system set up by telephone company to identify each long distance provider. So this XYZ company charges a PICC fee of $5 per line ( not uncommon) they charge 10 cents per minutes ( also not uncommon) and they bill in full minute increments. You can see from this example how quickly this can impact your companies bottom line. Often times, this is an accident. When placing your long distance change request the provider did not designate the change to every line for both traditional long distance and also your instate long distance ( which shows on your bill as LPIC). So what should you do? First, check your bill quarterly. In the section labeled  "Services and Equipment information" check to make sure the PIC and LPIC for each phone line matches. If they don't, contact the phone company and have them change it. You can also ask them to put a "PICC freeze" on your acct, which requires a signed document from any long distance provider indicating you approve the change.

Now Cramming, is a bit more sinister. Cramming is when a provider starts billing you for a service you may or may not been using and they bury it deep in your bill with the hope that you won't notice. Typically the way this happens is someone at your company gets a phone call and asks if you would like to try a new service free of charge for 90 days. Because they don't ask for any payment, most people say yes. What they don't realize is that after the 90 day trial you will get a charge on your bill.  Here is what to look for, on the summary page under the "new charges" section it will say "other charges," go to that page. you will see a billing company, a toll free number and then the product description. When you call the toll free number they will tell you that they are billing on behalf of another company and you must call them to cancel the service. They will provide you with a contact number for them. You must call that number  and request to cancel service. You can often get a credit for up to 90 days, sometimes longer depending on how hard you push.

I am glad to give further information about dealing with these matters so feel free to contact me with additional questions

In summary, I cannot emphasize enough, how important it is to review your bill at least quarterly and  asses the proper charges. If you don't fully understand you bill there are plenty of people (like me) who are willing to review them and answer you questions.

Thanks for reading today

Mike Shelah

BTW follow me on twitter @mistertelecom