Update
After reaching Buzz Telco's billing department today they promptly re-activated my login and re-issued a copy of the invoices.
There was an error in my mobile number by one digit despite me always phoning them on the correct number and Dun & Bradstreet texting me a notice to the correct number yesterday.
This explains why I never received a call requesting the funds to be paid from Buzz.
After reviewing the invoices there were two unpaid bills, I offered to pay the $58.00 total originally owing to the two invoices, removing the 2x $8.70 collection fees. Buzz Telco has agreed.
Whilst I stick by my original complaints of the service (sporatical billing, random outages, missing connection date, not being sent the welcome email/package with setup details, closing the account without settling or mentioning owed funds) I will say that for the support yesterday and today my call was answered within minutes and that the long wait times I had experienced could have resulted from me calling at night, despite them advertising 24x7 phone support.
Original Post
I've just gotten off the phone from Dun & Bradstreet after receiving the following email this morning:
Dear Mr stickyfingers,
BUZZ TELCO PTY LTD has referred your outstanding account of $75.40 to Dun & Bradstreet (Australia) Pty Ltd for immediate collection.
To avoid further recovery activity being commenced, you must settle your account immediately.OUTSTANDING DEBT
Debt owing to: BUZZ TELCO PTY LTD
Debt owing: $75.40
Ever since signing up with this deal I've had such a mixed bag of experiences with Buzz Telco but this has really pushed me the wrong way.
What's good about Buzz Telco?
With my FTTP connection, I received close to advertised speeds
I had a fairly reliable connection
It was extremely affordable.
What's bad?
Their billing sucks (I'll get to this in a moment)
Their support can never be contacted via phone (expect 2 - 3 hour wait times and hope it doesn't disconnect with you on hold)
When you lose connection, expect no communication, no apology, no reimbursement (not expecting this, but sometimes the outage can last a few days which you're still paying for), and for it to be completely random. I've only ever had one status notification email from Buzz Telco to tell me my speeds may be a little slow for a while.
You will receive no help during setup, at all. From my experience, they have no plan to actually set up your account when requested. I signed up weeks before moving in and placed a move in date in my account notes requesting to have it active from that date onwards. I didn't have a connection I could use for almost the first week and I sat on the phone for hours several times to reach them and get it set up.
The two main bad points are their support and billing. And when I say bad, what I really mean is they are some of the worst f***ing support and billing I've ever experienced.
Upon signing up I set up a direct PayPal billing agreement. Apart from my first payment I never had a single bill be automatically paid by this method. The only way I realized the funds weren't going to be debited from my account is when I received an overdue email. Despite me mentioning this to support when resolving my overdue bills this feature never worked.
There was also a period of around 2 months in which I didn't receive a single invoice from them. Followed by 3 invoices all at once. When logging in online during this time it showed $0.00 for each month. This should show how unreliable their billing is.
The good thing is that during this time they have applied a new promotion to my account bringing my total bill down to $29.00 a month.
Just after this, I posted a 3-star review on ProductReview.com.au of my experience which was promptly replied to by Mitch asking me to send him an email and he'd help me out, however, despite contacting him I never heard back. I even contacted support mentioning that I hadn't heard back from him and was told they'd let him know. But still, no reply.
About 1 month ago I contacted Buzz Telco to let them know the date we'd be moving out so we could have our connection terminated. To their credit, they promptly replied and confirmed they would disconnect our service at this point.
Since then I cannot login to my online account to submit a ticket, check for bills, etc as my login has been deleted and never received another bill. Buzz Telco never sent me another email. Until this debt collection email today.
Now instead of a usual bill of $29.00 they're asking for $75.40 and risk seriously effecting my credit history. To be fair I don't even know if that's for 1 month or multiple months but I assumed my account was finalized if they were so happy to close my portal access and not contact me anymore.
Dun & Bradstreet have instructed me to wait 2 weeks for a copy of the invoice which they will request from Buzz Telco so that I can review it. They will then be in contact with me.
Don't sign up with Buzz Telco.
tl;dr Buzz telco is bad, their support is un-reliable and hard to reach, their billing is broken and they will put your bill up 2.6x and send it to a debt collection/credit reporting agency.
"direct PayPal billing agreement"
how ? where ? never saw that before ?
when you 1st signup the service, you manually paid by paypal, they don't register you to paypal subs billing.
obviously you'll have to remember to pay your bills if you didn't setup CC direct debit
and anything that goes to debt recovery will incur admin + service fees
else, you think the debt recovery company do it for free ?