Complaint Review: Southern Linc Wireless

My husband, daughter, and I recently moved to another state to relocate for his job into a rural area where Southern Linc provides absolutely NO service, not even roaming services.  In other words, we could not even use the Southern Linc phones to call 911 should there be an emergency.

We called several times explaining that this was truly a "blackout area" for them (which certainly seems to be a valid reason for terminating one's contract in my opinion, early or otherwise). Until this incident, we had been with Southern Linc for approximately three years and received very good service overall. Should the Southern Linc phones work where we moved, we would have been fine with keeping them.

However, the salesperson at the local store was no help and simply referred us to the toll free customer service number. None of the people on the customer service line seemed to have any options to deal with this issue...until I had called about six times more. Then, they finally mentioned you could submit a letter to be considered for a waiver of early termination fees. I also offered to prove that we had moved to this particular rural location with NO SERVICE AT ALL.

So, I submitted said letter....to which we got no response for approximately a week. When I called back for like the 10th time, they said it takes a while to process and someone would contact us. I finally received two form letters in the mail stating that relocation had nothing to do with our contract and that we owed the said fees. However, they had been kind enough to refund the overpayment they had screwed up for months on end.

In conclusion, last time I checked contracts were for SERVICES provided, and if they cannot provide the services they contracted with me for, then why should I have to pay for it? It's not my fault they have no service here in this state regardless of why we moved here. Furthermore, even if they were going to refuse to waive the early termination fees, the least they could have done is treated us with the respect we deserved as customers who had caused them no problems in three years and called us to explain. Oh, did I forget to mention my husband worked for another subsidiary of this specific company, and they still treated us this HORRIBLY? No, instead we were treated as a number and were not even given the correct procedures to deal with the issue until I had called over five times. To be honest, this is the worst customer service I have recieved in years and NOT what I have come to expect from Southern Linc at all.