Casey Meraz

If you don’t want to read through my horrible experiences with Paetec and Windstream and are considering switching your data services to them, please run for the hills.  If I can save just one person from switching to a company with such major issues I will probably be giving five people a few extra years on their life.  Why is this?  Dealing with companies such as Paetec and Windstream when you need support resolutions will raise your blood pressure and probably help contribute to other major health problems. In all fairness my experience with Paetec was OK for a while until around the time they were purchased by Windstream. This year however I have had two major issues with them in different departments.  The first one was the biling department and the second was the technical support department.

The End Result: Don’t use Windstream or Paetec for your phone company.  Instead promptly run for the hills.  I would rather recommend Vonage even though I lost over 15k in their IPO.

 

My Paetec & Windstream Experience Nightmare

After switching phone companies for our hardware I called in one day to forward some old numbers that we had in the system.  We did not port these over to our system because they didn’t get many calls, but had enough call volume to justify keeping them.  I had the great idea of just forwarding these numbers which would allow us to set it and forget it.  Boy was I wrong. After this transition I called Paetec to get our numbers forwarded.  The friendly support representative told me that I would have to speak to my Paetec account manager Diane to get this complete.  Although I wanted it done soon I honored their request and waited for Diane to call me back.  Soon a day passed and then a week so I decided to call back and was told the same thing.  I repeated this step three more times before I finally decided that it was too ridiculous and asked to be escalated to her manager.  I was escalated and the same thing happend.  I waited a day and then called back for another escalation.  This time Diane called me back after the second supervisor escalation.  I was confused by this and told her how I was disappointed but how we could just fix it and move on. We talked things out, agreed, and everyone was happy.  That was until I realized that it still wasn’t done.  I repeated the above steps and got it sorted out again and then tested everything.  Finally after a ridiculous amount of phone calls it was fixed….

A few weeks later I received the Paetec/ Windstream Bill with over $700 in forwarding charges.  Since we forwarded numbers they charged us $35 a line without telling us.  This was a big deal considering that the entire bill previously was in the $700 range.  When I called our account manager to correct this I did not hear back from here.  So once again I did the escalation this time until I spoke to her manager in person.  She was nice and explained to me that Diane had many issues and she was going to scold her. I didn’t really care about this because I just wanted the bill fixed. As hard as it is to believe she promised me should get back to me in 24 hours.  Two days later I followed up with her and then waited another two days before hearing back.  She had the nerve to tell me she could only credit the bill after contract renewal negotiations.  Are you crazy?  Why would I sign up for another contract with Paetec or Windstream if I have to deal with this terrible support?  Fast forward another week and the resolution came to a credit in two months for the overage charges.

Overall I spent about eight or nine hours trying to deal with a simple issue that turned into this fiasco. This is reason #1 why Paetec and Windstream is a terrible company in my humble opinion.