A broadband user says she was charged almost £1000 after not reading the fine print (Image: Getty Images)
Joanne Batty, 54, has shared her experience of how the fine print in her renewal contract resulted in a staggering £1,000 in charges and penalties.
Nearing the end of her two-year broadband and landline phone deal when she called to renegotiate the terms. She was informed that she would need to replace her existing three landlines with an updated cloud-based model, complete with three new handsets.
She later discovered that the cost of installing and obtaining a new handset was considerably higher than she had initially thought.
Despite her original reservations, Joanne had agreed to the changes and she was then sent a document to sign, which she described as being approximately 60 pages long and not user-friendly.
She confessed that she didn’t read the entire document before signing it but later found out the cost per handset was £150 per handset, plus an additional £150 for installation fees – a total she hadn’t noticed in the contract.
Don’t miss…
According to Joanne, a customer service representative told her prior to signing the agreement that the installation cost for each phone would be £65, including installation.
When the new service failed to function properly, engineers had to visit her home on two separate occasions to attempt to rectify the issue, each visit costing another £150.
When the service still didn’t work, a third, more senior engineer was dispatched, who also left without resolving the problem, leaving Joanne with yet another £150 charge.
After enduring six months of uncertainty and nearly £1,000 in costs for engineer visits, installation fees, monthly payments, and “threats” due to non-payment, Joanne decided to take matters further.
She reached out to the managing director of her service provider via email and within a day, received a call from the CEO who agreed to cancel all charges and offer compensation of approximately £100. Her new service was also rectified within 20 minutes, as they managed to set things up remotely.
Joanne escalated the issue after six months of trouble (Image: SWNS)
However, the ordeal caused significant stress and Joanne claims she lost business during the period when her phones were not operational:”they weren’t able to install it properly and we couldn’t make any outgoing calls or receive calls for a period, until they were able to temporarily re-route landline calls to my mobile.”
She admits she would never have consented to the contract and its terms had she fully understood and read them: “I suppose not reading the terms and conditions didn’t help but the document was so un-user friendly,” and added, “when you’re running a business, time is money.
“This contract was in my name so they wouldn’t speak to my partner when they came round to try and sort things. They kept saying I’d signed it so I had to follow it through. The contract was very long and excessive and repetitive.”
Joanne is now collaborating with Adobe Acrobat to share her story in order to illustrate how AI can help uncomplicate complex contract small print.
Abhigyan Modi, senior vice president of Adobe Document Cloud stated: “Customers open billions of contracts each month and AI can be a game changer in helping simplify their experience.
“We are introducing new capabilities to deliver contract intelligence, making it easier for customers to understand and compare these complex documents and providing citations to help them verify responses, all while keeping their data safe.”