I was a customer of Telus for many - many years. All Telus payments were set up with direct debit from an account and all paperless billing emails were filtered to a Telus folder and I never worried about anything. In April, I go to a Telus store to look at getting a new phone and the sales guy gets me into a new phone with a Koodo plan that is less than the Telus plan I was on. Seemed fine. Didn’t feel like I was leaving Telus … just sliding sideways to Koodo. The sales guy migrated everything from the old phone to the new one and assured me the switch from Telus to Koodo was seamless and off I went. I carried on using my old number on the new phone with less monthly charges … everything seemed perfect.
4 months later I get a call from a collections agency saying I owe them $80. At first I think it’s a scam. Dig into it a bit more and find out it’s a Telus final payment from when I switched the phone. I dig further and discover that it’s standard operating procedure for Telus to delete all payment info when an account is cancelled. Problem is they do this before the final payment is calculated so the funds do not come from my account and the bill goes unpaid. As I am paperless, all notices are collected in an email folder that I never look at anymore. And for some reason Telus couldn’t call the number that the collections agency had no problems using.
After YEARS of being a happy loyal Telus customer I now have a 4 month non-payment mark from Telus on my credit report and it has completely tanked any chance of me getting any kind of loan. I discovered this by trying to get a mortgage for a house. Now I have to get a credit card I don’t need and spend months rebuilding my credit score, all because Telus deletes payment information before they take their last payment and can’t pick up a phone to contact an old customer.
The lessons I take from this is that Telus has some interesting practices that don’t seem to be in their best interest. And I need to manually call back old service providers to make sure they are all happy. Telus can be a bitter ex-provider that will beat up your credit report if given half a chance.
