Localpodiatry.com

Revdex.com:At this time, I have not been contacted by Localpodiatry.com regarding complaint ID ***.Sincerely,*** ***

Review: We had used LocalPodiatry.com in the past but discontinued working with them due to being billed for calls that were not supposed to be billable. However, they contacted us in early 2014 to resume the business relationship with the assurance that they had implemented new technology to weed out calls to our practice that should not be billable. They assured us that our past problems would not be repeated - that we would not be billed for calls from existing patients, as hang-ups, people calling for directions, and the like. We decided to give them another try but encountered the same problem again with calls being billed to our credit card that were not billable (e.g., established patients calling, patients asking for directions to our office, hang-up calls, after hours calls that were only a recording of our own answering machine message).

In attempting to resolve the problems, we found that recordings of the calls were no longer available to us after 60 days, though we had never been informed of this policy. A request to have those recordings released was denied. Throughout the time we were involved with this company for the 2nd time, their sales representative, [redacted], frequently called our office attempting to speak to me about sales by misidentifying himself as an employee of a podiatric practice calling about a patient, even going so far as to identify himself as the assistant to a known podiatrist in the Houston area. On that occasion, I actually left a patient in an exam room to take what was described as an urgent call from one of my colleagues' assistants regarding a patient. It turned out to be [redacted] calling about sales. This behavior only stopped when my [redacted] contacted [redacted] to tell him to discontinue this distracting and unethical behavior.

When I attempted to reach [redacted] about the billing problems, the staff of LocalPodiatry.com would not connect me to him and I did not receive any response from him regarding my complaint about the billing practices for invalid phone calls. Between April 2014 and December 2014, I paid $7,960 to LocalPodiatry.com which included constant billings for what should have been non-billable calls at $40 per call.

Some examples of their billing errors are as follows:

Call [redacted], 4/**/14, $40 - a recording of our own answering machine

Call [redacted], 4/**/14, $40 - an existing patient calling for directions

Call [redacted], 11/**/14 $40 - caller wanted to know our location

Call [redacted], 11/**/14 $40 - existing patient calling to say she was running late for an appointment

Call [redacted], 11/**/14 $40 - Existing patient calling to confirm the location of their appointmentDesired Settlement: I request a refund by check in the amount of $4,000 for improperly billed calls, billed calls that were blocked by a 60-day limit of which I was not made aware, loss of productivity due to staff wasting time reviewing invalid calls, taking bogus calls from the sales representative and time lost with patients by being pulled from attending to them due to a ruse of urgent phone calls from peers.

Consumer

Response:

At this time, I have not been contacted by Localpodiatry.com regarding complaint ID [redacted].Sincerely,[redacted]