PHONE CARD DOCTOR: Phone cards taking money off for non-connecting calls
December 15th, 2008
"I just placed a call and my phone card deducted money when my call didn’t connect. Why did this happen? Can I get my money back?"
This is an issue that gets reported to us more so when people are calling to mobile phones outside the US. It is much less frequent when calling to fixed landlines.
The basic reason why this happens is because of how the networks recognize the connection: you place the call; the phone card carrier’s network tries to connect to the mobile carrier’s network; after this connection is made, the mobile carrier tries to ring the mobile phone of the person you’re trying to call. The phone card network recognizes the connection to the mobile network as a connected call and starts the timer on your phone call. If the mobile phone is not answered, the phone card network still recognizes a connection between the networks and deducts time from your card.
Now you’re probably thinking that this still doesn’t make sense. It took me a little while to come to terms with it as well. Here’s another way you can think of it.
Let’s say you’re sending a letter to your friend. You address the envelope, put a stamp on it, and give it to your mail carrier. The mail carrier delivers it to your friend, but your friend doesn’t open the letter to read it. You’re still out the price of the stamp regardless of whether or not your friend opens it. That stamp paid for the mail carrier to deliver the letter regardless of whether or not it was opened.
Now with that said, phone card carriers have been known to add credit back to your PIN for calls that have not connected to an answer but have still deducted money from your PIN. To see if they’ll add this money back to your PIN, contact the technical support number for your phone card and speak to one of the carriers’ representatives. We can’t guarantee that they’ll give you credit back for these calls, but it’s at least an option to try.
I haven’t found a good way of avoiding this from happening with mobile phones. It’s all in how the networks communicate with each other. This can happen with any phone card you purchase from any retailer.
If this is happening when calling to landlines, the only advice I can offer is to not let the call ring too many times. Customers have reported that if they don’t let the call ring too many times, they don’t seem to get time deducted for the call attempt.
Another tip just passed along to me from Ron is ending your call as if you were going to dial another number without disconnecting your PIN. In most cases, this can be done by holding the pound key (#) down for 2 seconds or pressing the star key (*) twice (check your card’s instructions on which to use) . This way, you can make sure that the call is disconnected.
As with any issue, if you feel that the carrier’s technical support has not helped you, please send us an e-mail at support@zaptel.com, and our Customer Service will try to work on your behalf with the carrier.
Phone Card Coupon for Week of December 15th
Through December 21st, $1 off your purchase of a new phone card or recharge to your existing phone card from ZapTel. Use the following code to receive the discount:
TRYZAP1
Enter the coupon code on the Review Your Order page, and be sure to click the "Add Coupon Code" button on the page to apply the discount. Offer expires at Midnight Central Time on December 21, 2008.
This entry was posted on Monday, December 15th, 2008 at 2:52 pm and is filed under Phone Card Tips. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
