Reading Your Southwestern Bell Phone Bill

Making Its Bills Customer-Friendly Has Always Been Important to Southwestern Bell

San Antonio, Texas, December 18, 1998

Making our bills customer-friendly has always been important to Southwestern Bell. That's why we redesigned our Southwestern Bell bill two years ago to make it easier to read and understand.

It's why we have included larger print size and additional languages, as well as a new format that allows us to more clearly summarize all charges up front.

Because understanding line item fees is of great concern to our customers -- and thus, our company -- we are taking steps to educate our customers on these charges and remind them what resources are available to them.

When a customer has a question about their bill, we encourage them to call us. We have more than 1,000 customer service representatives specially-trained on billing issues available in 21 centers across Texas, Oklahoma, Missouri, Arkansas and Kansas.

If you have questions about your bill, call us.

Residential customers: 1-800-585-7928

Bilingual customers: Spanish-speaking in Texas: 1-800-585-7928

Business customers: 1-800-559-7928

Spanish-speaking in Arkansas, Oklahoma, Kansas and Missouri: 1-800-559-0050

Chinese, Mandarin and Cantonese and Vietnamese-speaking: 1-800-722-8438

Our Web site also includes line-by-line details of bill contents.

In addition to helping customers understand their bills, Southwestern Bell offers customers great flexibility in how they may pay their bills. Our customers have the option to pay their bills by mail or in-person at many local retail outlets, arrange for automatic deductions from their bank accounts, and, in some states, prepay for local phone service.

We also understand that our customers are concerned about slamming and cramming. These types of fraud are of utmost importance to Southwestern Bell and we have taken several steps to help combat them.

• We have implemented an automated system to notify customers by phone when a change is made to their long distance provider.
• Through our "Read Your Bill" and "Hang Up on Slamming" campaigns, we have urged our customers to carefully review their bills each and every month to make sure that they haven't been victimized.
• In most states, we offer Customer Choice Protection, a free service that provides customers with a way to help protect their choice of providers from being switched without their permission.
• We've tightened our control over the bill phrases and charge descriptions used by other service providers for whom we do billing to ensure more descriptive text phrases and reduce ambiguity.
• We have stopped billing for approximately 40 companies about which Southwestern Bell had received excessive complaints.