I am a frustrated customer of Sunrise mobile. Please note the chain of events below:
Jan: I called Sunrise to cancel my subscription. They said can only be cancelled by March. So I asked for cancellation in March
April: Get a new bill
April: Call them again. They apologize and said it is their error. Asks me to disregard all bills. They send me a letter confirming cancellation.
June/July: Again get a bill
July: I send them a strongly worded letter asking them to get their house in order and not to bother me again. I do not get any response.
August: Get a ‘final reminder’ to pay 45 CHF failing which my account will be deactivated. First, I terminated my account so there is no question of deactivation. Second, they do not mention about my termination or any correspondence I had with them
October: I receive a letter from Intrum Justitia asking for 78 CHF (20 CHF for Sunrise + 58 CHF as collection fees). Please note the Sunrise fees changed from 45 to 20 (they apparently had an error when i called them). The case had been handed over to debt collector. I call Intrum Justicia and send them the cancellation letter from Sunrise. They say they can’t help it.
I call sunrise customer service. They apologize and say that 20 chf is the rent due from Jan and Feb. No one informed me that I had dues + I think i paid all bills. Failing to find a satisfactory answer, I asked for the supervisor. Supervisor gets on the phone and tells me that they will call me back immediately, but no one called.
I am frustrated. It is not the question of money, but of principle. What should i do? If I do not pay can Intrum Justicia cause me trouble? I have B-permit.
Shall I go to police? Or shall I ask for all records so far proving that I have not paid? Or is there anything I should do?
Principle can prove to be very expensive in Switzerland, especially in relation to a situation caused by outstanding bills ( regardless of whether the bill is correct or not).
Personally, I would pay the Intrum Justicia bill, because, yes indeed, they can cause a lot of trouble. If still driven by principle, I might then try to reclaim the money from Sunrise, but I wouldn't necessarily expect to see any of it. But I'd be more likely to regard it as a learning fee regarding unpaid bills, and shelf the principle in this case.
Please excuse my ignorance as I do not have a Sunrise plan or any other plan for that matter, I am on pre-pay.
GinNTonic, would it not be more effective if you went to a Sunrise store and sorted it out in person? Clearly their customer service/account handling over the phone has been hopeless. Perhaps they will handle the matter better face to face.
Sunrise (who usually invoice quarterly) - agreed to cancel your contract as of 1st March. In April they sent an invoice for the period (Jan-Feb) - which you refused to pay.
You continued to refuse to pay - and it went to a debt collection agency.
What exactly is your complaint? Just pay the 78chf and move on.
I had the same thing happen to me a while back. I had to open a Sunrise account for a mobile application project. I cancelled the account by a phone call, but they continued to send me bills. I kept calling, but would lose telephone connection after explaining the situation. Finally, I received a letter from Intrum Justitia. This is where it got interesting.
On the phone with Intrum Justitia, they said I was required by fine print in the contract to send a cancellation letter. I never did, and phone calls with Sunrise never revealed that. So I told them I refuse to pay. They threatened to send it to my Gemeinde's Betreibungsamt. I told them to go ahead, and I will contest it.
They then berated me for being American.... "You Americans think you can go anywhere in the world and do whatever you please." I was shocked. Partly embarrased. But found the whole thing ridiculous.
A letter came in from Betreibungsamt. I told them I contested it. They had me come in and sign a form with my explanation. I never heard from Intrum Justitia nor Sunrise afterwards.
Ironically, I found myself at Sunrise headquarters in Oerlikon for a job interview a few months later. There, I realize the company was one huge disorganized mess. Everyone was stressed out. I didn't bothering accepting follow up interviews. I think I would be miserable and get sick if I worked in a place like that.
anyways, sucks. It's your responsibility to be on top of what is paid and what is not, nonetheless it sounds awful. If it has already gone to a collector I'd pay it right away, keep all mail and receipts and find out where you can direct a formal complaint. I believe they have to send you a payment reminder before handing it over to a debt collector.
Anyways, you should find out if it is indeed true that you had outstanding debts from your bills (from before you cancelled the services). Experience makes you wise but seldom rich. Good luck.
isn't it standard that services like this require written notice to cancel - not just an email or a phone call, but a signed abkündigungs letter? Personally I'd never expect anything else.
Is there the option of walking into a Sunrise store with a letter requesting contract termination and dealing with a customer agent in person in order to clearly discuss the terms and conditions of terminating a contract?
All store agents have access to all customer accounts ...
I too thought you need to provide a written request, 3 month in advance to terminate a contract ... standard procedure in Switzerland.
Yes, I have since learned that 3 mo. written cancellation is standard in Switzerland. At the time, I was fairly new to Switzerland, read very little german and signed that crazy contract with the tiny font size written in German. Must be why they ranted about my Amerikanskiism.
Technically, they were correct. But my repeated attempts to discuss with them lead nowhere, and they did not disclose the steps I needed to take. I threatened to make a case with the Betreibungsamt that they have a negligent practice of passively allowing these situations to occur despite repeated requests for customer service because they generate more revenue in the end. Not sure if that point helped at all, but they did in the end settle.
In the end, I paid off the terms of my contract according to my use of the service, but I refused to pay for the time after my verbal cancellation and accumulated late fees. After about a year of this, it had accumulated to a couple of hundred CHFs.
Now that I recall, I had a 1 year contract. I cancelled 9 months into it with 3 months to go. I told them I wanted to pay off the rest of the contract in advance, and stop the service. So I paid the remaining balance with my last payment. I assumed it was settled, but this is where the trouble began. A cancellation letter with my last payment would have been the proper way to close it. But Sunrise Customer Service was quite useless in the conversation.