Let’s talk about money. Very often as a consultant, customers approach me who want to take the least expensive route to purchase a product or a service. Very often it’s a good idea, but often the savings you realize on the front end are going to come back to haunt you on the back end. Perfect example, I have a customer who was sold long distance (switched) at .039 per minute in a .06 world. Sounds great doesn’t it? When they hired Turner to review their bills we discovered they were, in fact, being charged .039 per minute for every one minute call but they were actually charged in three minute increments. So, their incredibly great rate of .039 was actually .117 in a .06 world. The hidden billing was so deep in the invoice it was difficult to find if you didn’t know what to look for. Additionally, their PICC fees that should have been maybe .32 per line kept increasing each month until it was $7.95 per line.

In their defense they were sold a bill of goods and trusted their vendor’s great pricing. Then when they checked their bill, it looked right. When we first audited their bill it ran about $12,000 a month. Once we fixed it, their bill was lowered to about $3,500 a month. So, the moral of the story,

‘SOMETIMES THE MONEY YOU SAVE IS NOT WORTH THE PAIN, AGGRAVATION AND MONEY IT COSTS YOU IN THE LONG RUN.’

Advise:

1. Don’t automatically believe an incredible rate. Make sure you have an out in your contract should you discover you are being over billed.

2. Always check their rate for all those extra fees and charges and ‘get it in writing.’ Find out if they are going to bill you extra for administration costs recovery or to recover their cost of doing business in any way! I struggle constantly with companies that are promised one rate by a sales person and then never see that wonderful rate on their bill.

3. Don’t be afraid to add (to the contract your own requirements. Remember, your strength is before they actually have your business not after. If they won’t allow it, ask them for a signed addendum by an authorized representative of the company. If they won’t give you that, there are a lot of good vendors out there that want your business, shop around.

4. Often they will show you in their contract that if you don’t like their service you can leave ‘if they don’t try to fix the problem.’ Note the wording, almost everyone will try to fix the problem. That doesn’t mean they actually will fix it or can fix it. But the word ‘try’ will keep you in that contract. Often there is a 100% penalty for early termination…so read it carefully!

5. Sometimes you’ll find out that you only have one vendor to choose from and shopping around is not an option and they won’t allow you to alter your contract, then advise them your going to record the conversation and record their promises with their name and some verifying information like a birth date.

When in doubt, have a professional look over your contract and make sure you aren’t digging yourself a pit to fall in later.

We wish to thank every one of you who have supported this site by registering to become a member, those who have posed questions, and those who have purchased our products ~ thank you.

When we first conceived the idea of this site, we received a lot of positive response. Since the airing of the Florida Cramming on Get Gephardt, KUTV, we have received criticism that our information is not free. As much as we appreciate the comments so that we can better serve our customers, we want to point out that you can get your questions answered for free. We discovered that many people do not know what a Forum is and therefore, people were confused where they could ask questions and get them answered for free. The Question~Answers (Forums) is where those free answers can be obtained.

Now please bare in mind, we are a for-profit business. Our parent company, Turner Telecommunications (Turner) has been creating savings and producing recoveries for businesses for nearly 15 years. Our products are much more comprehensive than what you’re going to find in the Forum. Our products document how residential consumers can do what Turner does for themselves but on a smaller scale. In November of 2006, when Mr. Gephardt aired Turner on his show assisting him in his investigation on fraudulent charges, we had a “free” five-page document for download that detailed how consumers can identify fraud, stop it, and get their money back. Although, we had thousands of hits on our website, the segment did not get Turner one customer, which we had hoped. For weeks after that segment, we helped hundreds of residential consumers for free with their phone bill. Since this last showing, on April 18, 2007, again, we have helped numerous residential consumers, for free, with their phone bill. Some people chose to complain about only finding for purchase information, which was fine because it helped us realize that they weren’t able to find the “Free” area easier.

So my apologies go out to every visitor who felt that our site was not prepared after the April Bill Gephardt airing. We take full responsibility and we have tried to accommodate all the requests we have received to make our site easier to navigate and accessible. Again, we appreciate the continued support and please feel free to continue submitting questions and comments.

Hello, my name is Diania Turner. I am the founder of Turner Telecommunications, Inc.(Turner) was founded because of the outrageous cheating, lying and fraud that takes place in telecommunications. When I started Turner I thought I could save the world by making companies aware of the wrongful billing and up selling that goes on in the telecom industry. I thought I could make a difference. Unfortunately, the only companies I have been able to help are the ones that use Turner. The rest, including the consumers are like sheep going to the slaughter – sorry. Virtually everyone and every company is either being cheated on their telephone bills, up sold products and services they don’t need or just sold a snow job and buy it because they don’t know any better.

This is why “MyTelecomGuru” has been conceived. We need to help everyone to identify telecom billing errors, be able to identify what products they need and those they don’t as well as make them aware of how to fix their billing problems themselves. Turner has great success as a consumer advocate but we are a small part of the solution compared to the giants like AT&T, Verizon, MCI, etc. With millions of customers worldwide and only one Turner, we ask, how much can we really do to make a difference? We intend MyTelecomGuru to be a larger part of the solution by calling consumers to action to help us populate the Forum with questions everyone can benefit from and receiving feedback from consumers on our “How To” docs so we can continue to develop even better material.

MyTelecomGuru can make a difference. It will give all of us a way to communicate, spread the word on companies that cheat you, help others to resolve billing issues and empower the consumer with knowledge. Though MyTelecomGuru is small today, with you we can become a much larger part of
the solution.

So, ask us your questions and let us help. Often we might refer you to information that has already been set up as a download that you can purchase because it may have more complete information than we can offer in an email or in the Forum. You have our guarantee, we will address your issues by doing our best to help you resolve your problems and providing solutions to make it a level playing field for the consumer.

Together we can make a difference and get the giants to pay attention … “There is a new sheriff in town … and he’s MyTelecomGuru.com”