I don’t mean to pick on the telecommunications companies but they really make things hard to ignore. The day after the incident with Cingular, I received a letter in the mail from SBC saying "Your enrollment in the SBC EasyCharge program has been approved for the telephone number referenced above". Above my name it said "Reference #". There was no number. The letter was signed by "SBC Treasury Operations". Makes me wonder at least two things. First, how can a company send out letters to real customers with a blank reference number? Secondly, knowing that every contact with a customer is a chance to sell the products and services of the company, why would the SBC Marketing department allow letters to be sent to customers from SBC Treasury Operations? Since they don’t know what phone number they are writing about, they probably don’t know which departments are writing letters to customers. As they say, go figure.

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