A Vancouver woman says she learned the hard way that she shouldn't have depended on Telus to transfer her voice mails in a move.
Telus has been unable to retrieve Celena Benndorf's nearly 40 messages from her voice mail that were lost Oct. 16 when she and her telephone number moved from Kitsilano to Kensington-Cedar Cottage.
"A lot of these were things like my mom singing to me, special memory things that will never be repeated," Benndorf said. "And then some of them were business and legal related-evidence."
On the evening of her move, Benndorf checked her voice mail from her parents' home. She discovered she had no saved messages. She immediately phoned Telus and a customer service agent told her how to retrieve them. The agent said voice mails are backed up on a server for 24 hours after a move. Retrieving them didn't work.
Later calls that night and the next two days resulted in being put on hold or being told by agents the company was working on her problem. But on Oct. 19 a manager told Benndorf her voice mail could not be reinstated. Benndorf, who previously worked for Telus, phoned and asked to be connected to the president's office, but she was directed to customer service.
She says a retired friend and colleague who worked with Telus for more than 20 years told her the company keeps messages on its server for a week. "I think the story is that they are on the server and they can't be bothered," she said. "Big old Telus can't be bothered to go digging for a little residential customer's voice mail that they lost. It's not worth their while."
But Telus spokesperson Shawn Hall says a technical problem occurred during the transfer of Benndorf's messages and they are not retrievable. He noted the company completes thousands of transfers successfully. "It can be a technically complex manoeuvre to move them in the server from one address to another and that's what happened in this case. They were lost in that move," Hall said.
He said customer service agents are instructed to tell customers to back up their voice mails before a move. He added those with deluxe voice messaging like Benndorf's can log into the Telus site and save their voice mails into sound files. Benndorf says when she placed her work order she wasn't told that she should back up her voice mails or her options for doing so.
"[It] kind of begs the question of why one pays Telus a monthly fee for voice mail. You can get your own machine and have it for free," Benndorf said.
crossi@vancourier.com
Twitter: @Cheryl_Rossi
