IF YOU'RE reading this inside a cemetery, I have an advice: If you don't want to start this day with bad news, stop reading right now. What you are about to read are horror stories, and I guess by now you've probably had enough of that over the Halloween weekend and the horrifying traffic going to the cemetery.

But if you've managed to read this far, well then, read on. Come with me as we dig up the grave of buried consumer complaints. Pick up that shovel and throw aside the dirt which has covered the service of a cellular phone company called Smart Communications Inc.

No hatchets have to be buried here. Just dead people who embody the rotting carcass of Smart customers who died waiting for efficient service to be rendered. For the last three weeks before Halloween I have been deluged by e-mail and letters asking for their grievances about Smart's service to be aired through media. I promised I'd give them space here this week. In fairness to Smart which called up to ask for a rejoinder space on today's issue, we'll also hear their side of the story.

First off is Anthony Bengzon who circulated his complaint via e-mail. I'll let him do the talking:

"My wife recently purchased a Smart Buddy pack, a prepaid cellphone kit. (There is) a devious scheme by Smart to dupe not just its own customers, but even those who make calls to its customers. A feature called 'Call divert' allows the subscriber to divert calls to your phone either to another number, or to a voice mailbox if the phone is off or is outside the areas covered by the network. In the case of Smart, the default setting is direct to the voice mailbox. The subscriber is charged P8 per minute to retrieve messages from the voice mail box. Parties who call the Smart subscriber but whose calls are diverted to the mailbox for whatever reason are charged for the call (whether or not they leave a message).

"Of course, theoretically, you can choose to disable the feature and the phone certainly has the facility to do it. However, Smart will not allow you to cancel or disable this feature. They say it can't be done!

"I called the Smart helpline to complain about this situation. I spoke with an operator named Pearl who heard me out and said she could not do anything about it. I asked to speak with her supervisor and was passed to a certain Lea and she said she'd bring it up to her superiors but that she didn't see how they could disable the feature. Apparently she thought everybody takes their word for it that the system works that way and nothing can be done about it. Well, I have news for Smart: My nephew owns exactly the same kind of phone (a Nokia 3210) except that he subscribes to Globe. He can disable the Call Divert feature in his phone at will.

"This letter was written to sound a general consumer alert. The consuming public should not be forced to subscribe to and be charged for services it neither wants nor needs.''

Next is Marian Catedral who was forced to wait for seven months for her phone to be repaired, only to encounter inefficiencies on her way to getting her phone back.

Marian's unit was entrusted to Smart's Sucat Telecenter on March 10. Suffice it to say that she waited for a long time before getting a response. It turned out the phone had already been released as early as June 9, but nobody from Smart bothered to inform her.

To cut a long story short, Marian felt the Smart office at Sucat did not attend to her grievances very well, which led her to jot down a few tips about customer care which she sent to Geoffrey Prudencio, public affairs officer at Smart, and to Alex Caeg, customer care head. Here are some of those tips:

"1) Give the proper customer training to your people, especially the frontliners. Tell them to face the matter head-on and not skirt the issues. Most of the time, a problem may be solved or an irate customer may be appeased with a simple apology or a personal call to explain the problem. The longer the customer is faced with silence, the worst it will be for the company.

"2) Do not put (the word) 'Hotline' in the telephone numbers you give out to clients when these cannot be answered immediately. The essence of a hotline is for somebody to answer it within at least three rings.

"3) Always acknowledge a complaint or a suggestion or probably even an insult. My former boss Senator Saguisag always made sure that letters sent to him are answered. Despite his very busy schedules he would take the time to go over the letters we would already prepare for him to be sent out to constituents. He always believed that, if people take the time to write him a letter, he should at the very least take the time to answer them back.

"4) Check and update your webpage. It is very embarrassing for a company such as yours to have a webpage that has outdated fax numbers. Telephone numbers are not even indicated.

"5) Your telephone operators should also be given a guide to the telephones, fax numbers and names of managers and officers of your telecenters. I called a lot of times and the numbers being given to me are not updated. They do not even know the names of the officers in the centers, which I think is very basic.

"6) Please advise all your staff that when someone calls their office (in this case the Sucat Telecenter) and asks the name of the manager, not to answer, 'Bakit po?' This for me, is clearly the height of customer insensitivity and lack of corporate telephone etiquette.

"7) As a company that boasts of the biggest number of subscribers, is there a systematic and immediate mechanism that makes you reply to or answer customer complaints? Some people who have read the e-mail I sent out responded that they have had the same problem as mine. One lady said her phone was with the Sucat Telecenter for two months for repair. When she went to check if it had been fixed, she had to wait for almost half a day only to be told that her phone had been with them for a month and it is beyond repair. Waiting for two months plus half a day adds insult to injury.''

Then there's the story of Dennis Lee:

"Smart is short-changing their customers. Take for instance the bill of my cousin who subscribed to their Smart Gold service. His bill was P850.35. He gave them P1,000 and what do you know--they gave him a change of P149.50.You might ask where the 15 centavos went. Well, the customer service guy said he had no small change! My cousin argued his case but got nowhere. I know this is not just an isolated case. Multiply the 15 centavos to a couple of hundred thousand subscribers and voila! Money! Money!

"I hope this would be a wake-up call for all the consumers and customers of various companies that they must be vigilant about their rights.''

There's also Ria Ancheta:

"I have two friends who used to subscribe to Smart, and they sent their units back for repair, and after waiting for so long, opted to transfer to other cellular companies.

"I've had my share of quarrels with other customer service representatives in various industries, in various areas all over the Philippines and I know how it feels to get angry, to get frustrated, to hurl threats and to wish that they would just die.

"It is obvious that Smart has a lot to learn from this experience. They must understand that they are at the beck and call of all their customers. If the customer says 'jump' they must ask 'how high?' and then jump.

"Long live the rights of the consumer!''