Well, ok, Toll Free Hazing probubly isn't the correct phrase, but it's the only think I can think of to call it. Basically here's the story. Heard about this on a site visit and it's been bothering me a bit. One of our customers had a client of theirs who apparently lost some money and blamed it on our customer. For simplicity of telling the story, we'll call our customer "TechCo". I'm not gonna give their real name since I think that they'd prefer to stay anonymous through this.
Well anways, since it was their client who was a fault, TechCo wasn't responsible for the loss of money and therefor wouldn't answer calls for compensation from the client. So what their client did was he called their 800 number and left the phone off the hook on hold with the standard "The next customer service rep will be with you shortly" bit playing in the background, and did this over a weekend.
So come Monday morning the phone had officially been off the hook for a total of aproximately 63 hours. The toll free number costs TechCo 15 cents a minute per call. The client did this to TechCo for 4 consecutive weekends over a one month period. So the math adds up like this.
63 hours x 4 weekends = 252 hours of usage.
252 hours x 60 minutes per hour = 15,120 minutes of total usage just from this one customer.
15,120 minutes of usage x $0.15 per minute = $2268
The client claims that TechCo owes him something like $3500 and apparently was trying to make them pay that one way or another. I don't know what's happening with this right now because I haven't been following it very closely, but I found it rather disturbing personally.
What would you say would be the legality of this? Personally, I say that our customer (TechCo) needs to sue their client for the money he cost them plus penalties and maybe some other legal action, but then again, I'm no legal expert. Opinions?
Well anways, since it was their client who was a fault, TechCo wasn't responsible for the loss of money and therefor wouldn't answer calls for compensation from the client. So what their client did was he called their 800 number and left the phone off the hook on hold with the standard "The next customer service rep will be with you shortly" bit playing in the background, and did this over a weekend.
So come Monday morning the phone had officially been off the hook for a total of aproximately 63 hours. The toll free number costs TechCo 15 cents a minute per call. The client did this to TechCo for 4 consecutive weekends over a one month period. So the math adds up like this.
63 hours x 4 weekends = 252 hours of usage.
252 hours x 60 minutes per hour = 15,120 minutes of total usage just from this one customer.
15,120 minutes of usage x $0.15 per minute = $2268
The client claims that TechCo owes him something like $3500 and apparently was trying to make them pay that one way or another. I don't know what's happening with this right now because I haven't been following it very closely, but I found it rather disturbing personally.
What would you say would be the legality of this? Personally, I say that our customer (TechCo) needs to sue their client for the money he cost them plus penalties and maybe some other legal action, but then again, I'm no legal expert. Opinions?
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