Your carrier says we rejected your request?

One of the things that gets to me sometimes is phone companies that seem to automatically blame the other carrier and say that a transfer request was rejected even if they never put the request through. They tend to do this because the other carrier is usually as bureaucratic and hard to reach as they are and because they don’t want to admit that they’ve had the request for a week or two and haven’t even sent it to the releasing carrier yet. Fortunately we’re not bureaucratic or hard to reach. So if any phone company ever tells you that the number was rejected, you should call us with them on the phone. If you call us with them on the line, we can often clear it up. But if you call us after hanging up with them, you wind up being in the middle and it’s harder to sort it out than it is if you bring the two ends together.

Most phone companies look for any reason to reject an order and end up rejecting a high percent of requests. That’s why resporg forms always tell you to fill it out exactly the same as it appears on your phone bill and often request that you include a copy of your phone bill. We do things differently though. We’re not trying to hold onto our customers. We’re the only phone company that is trying to give away our customers and help them transfer to other companies as quickly as possible. So rather than looking for any excuse to reject a transfer request we look for any excuse to release a number. We can’t release a number if nothing matches up, but as long as something matches, whether it’s the company name, the address or the signor we know our customers want to transfer the number. That’s why it’s almost always false if a phone company tells you that it was rejected.

(The paragraphs above are actually from our Toll Free Manual, but we run into this a lot so I figured it was worth posting here, since it's easier to refer people to.)

It's also important to point out that that the representatives you talk to are never the ones that actually send the form to the other carrier. Many phone companies aren't resporgs so they have to send the paperwork to another organization that will put it into their system and then forward that information to us. It usually takes anywhere from several days to a couple weeks for them to get the request to us. (see http://www.tollfreenumbers.com/speed.shtml) We process the requests the same day we receive them but it's usually not a good idea to release a number to the new carrier before they are ready for it.

The bottom line is that you shouldn't assume that when the rep says they've sent it in, that they've sent it to us, because it goes through several hands and stages on their side first. And if they tell you we rejected it, ask them f they'd like to talk to the people at the other carrier that do the releasing and give us a call with them on the line. That way we can talk directly to them and you won't feel caught in the middle. We release a lot of numbers and do this better and faster than anyone else and will be happy to clear up any misconceptions or confusion.
If your carrier says that we've rejected it