The WORST customer service ever!!! We had a contract with Cbeyond but unfortunately was bought out by Birch Communications. We needed to get our services relocated to new location and after 20 days trying to get status and numerous calls with no update. I finally was fed up and called, i would not get off the phone until i was given a status. After a 30 minute hold i was finally told they were not able to move our service to our new location and they would release us from our contract but with a termination fee of the outrageous amount of $3700! AYFKM?? I requested to speak to a manager who turned out to be rude and condescending. he kept talking over me and his only response was that it was in the contract. This company is a big FRAUD!! This company should be shut down for business!!! read more

I received a call today at my business from Birch, telling me they were working with Verizon and could lower my rates about 30%. Our bill is enormous, so I figured I'd listen to what she said, being with Verizon and all... The rep was a very fast talker and danced around every question I had. I don't agree to verbal, non-initiated contracts, so even though I was skeptical, I thought I'd look over a hard copy and see what they had to offer. I asked her to email me information..."well, there's really nothing I can email"...red flag #1. Ok, so let me do some research and I'll give you a call back. Is there a number I can reach you? "well, no, but I can answer your questions now"...red flag #2. So the discount is from Verizon? "well, no; we are a separate company. Verizon bills us and we bill you." Red flag #3. Alright, then I'll think about it and you can give me a call back in a couple of weeks. "well, the discount won't be available then". RED FLAGS FLYING EVERYWHERE! I told her no thank you, then and went online. Every single review I have read on them is bad. Considering their flim flam sales tactics and now the bad reviews, I will be avoiding Birch Communications like the plague. read more

I get several calls a week. The first ones I would answer and they would hang up. I would call back and say to remove me from their call list. Yet I still get phone calls. Each time it happens I report them to the FTC - who also has done nothing to stop the calls. The last time I spoke to someone from this company I told her that I had been reporting them. She stared yelling and screaming at me and I could still hear her as I hung up the phone. Yet the called again today. She said that she was with AT&T and when I said I only deal with AT&T she hung up. What does it take to get them to stop calling? read more

Anyone who says this is a good company must be getting paid off by them or work for them. The man that was just accosting me on the phone had the nerve to say that he Google'd my company and said there were bad reviews for us after I told him he had horrible customer service skills. My company doesn't advertise on the internet, nor provide a service/product of any kind to consumers. The nerve of these people is sickening to me. I have been harassed by them at least 5 times in the past two work weeks. I even called my personal At&t rep who told me to beware and stay far away from them. I'm not exactly sure what they do to "lower your rates" but from what I know, a charge is added to your bill and that's it. If you are reading this, PLEASE HEED THE WARNING AND DO NOT GIVE THEM THE CHANCE TO EVEN SPEAK WITH YOU. read more

Zero Stars... As a business owner...Birch is a hot mess. Don't waste your time or money. If you are current customer get everything in writing. They are short timers...nobody can stay in business for long treating customers the way they do. read more

Do Not do business with them! horrible!! After swithcing to Birch after they merged from cbeyond we decided to cancel in Feb 2015. Birch continued to debt our bank account for 8 months even though I called them every month telling them that I had canceled.This went on for 8 months finally after months of aggravation Brich reimembursed us for their mistake in Oct 2015. Now March of 2016 a year after we canceled from Brich we get another bill for $2658.48 for early cancellation. I talked to a women named Maureen and man named David Polzin in customer service they told me that I had to pay $2,658.48 because when we canceled we were supose to send them a written cancellation 3 months prior to canceling. (Its funny that birch has no record of me talking to their customer service department before we canceled and at that time I was informed that there wouldnt be a problem to cancel and no metion of any cancelation fee). But they do have record of somone from our office calling May 2015 to cancel! Hum? We canceled in Feb 2015! So now it looks like we over paid again for 3 months!! After all this we owe them $2,658.48 customer service said I should have read the contract!! Vincent Oddo You need to look at your yelp ratings!!! BAD BAD BAD read more

Customer service is terrible, technicians are terrible, i had an employee tell me how horrible he thought the company was after hearing about our issues and the issues of other people he had to deal with. We have not had phones for 3 days, we have been told the techs would be out plenty of different times and they never show up. Please go out of business, i will die a happy man. read more

Our company used CBeyond for a long time and we were very happy with them. Renewal time came and we signed up for 3 yrs. 1 year after signing the renewal, Birch bought them up. We had series of outages with our phones & internet, for days! As the phone lines are down, we had to use our cell phones and have been on hold at least 30 minutes each time. They also keep blaming AT&T. Each time you call their tech support, they dangle the word "escalating" your ticket, like we have not heard it the day before. Company I worked with before is having the same issue. They have several outages on both phones and internet all the time. They really deserve no stars. One star rating is very generous. Beware of signing up with them. They are HORRIBLE! read more

I recently started receiving invoices stating that I owe a balance and am under contract with them. Never heard of them in my life until I had to google them due to these random invoices. SCAM. read more

I just received a call from a Birch Communications saying they work with Century Link to get pricing down for their customers. This is a scam and I just want everyone to know. When I asked if I could verify them with Century Link he got defensive and said "No. We compete with them and I am trying to take business away from them." But that was after initially saying that he worked for and with Century Link. Do not fall for it! read more

If I could give negative stars I would. The price is not really competitive, and they have NO.CUSTOMER.SERVICE. I have been having problems with my device for several weeks and despite leaving repeated messages with my rep and their machine no one has called back. Today I finally got an actual human to talk to and guess what? No mobile tech support on the weekends! I am on my way to Verizon now. read more

Like the others, it's too bad that there is no negative star ratings for Cbeyond/Birch. This is the worst company I have ever dealt with in my 36 years in business. I've been trying now for seven months to have my phone numbers ported out of this company. So far only two out of the four have been completed. One excuse after another. Found out the other day my remote call forward numbers had been wrongly cancelled for two months resulting in porting rejection and lost business and more monthly payments to Birch until the numbers are ported. Besides poor sales practices they don't have a clue what's going on. Stay away from this company unless you want grief in your life. I filed a complaint with the FCC two weeks ago and have now hired an attorney. They just ignore complaints. As the other reviewers have said BEWARE!!!! read more

DO NOT USE THIS COMPANY (If I could draw a skull and crossbones here I would!) If it were possible on yelp I wouldn't even give these people ONE star. Birch bought the company we had our phone service through (Global Link) at the end of March 2015, and we rolled with it. We used to be with TMC in the very beginning, then Global LInk bought from them. We didn't have a problem at all when it switched over from TMC so we didn't think much about the new change. About 45 days into our new relationship however, our phones suddenly stopped ringing (yesterday). This is our peak season and Memorial Day is coming right up. Our customers (and new ones) need their merchandise for the holiday! It is now the 2nd day and our phones are still not ringing. I tried calling our number from my cell phone and a recording said "this number has been disconnected or is no longer in service". It sounds like we are out of business. Nobody seems to know what anyone else is doing at Birch. Everyone there blamed the outage on someone else. I spent the whole day Monday on the phone calling every name I was given to find out what was going on and to get help, Each person sent me on to the next until I was back at the beginning again and had to start all over. This went on 3 times! It was the most outlandish and amazing circle jerk- Wow!This morning they told us we were no longer a customer and that they didn't have a record of our account. Meanwhile we are trying to get a new phone company (Cox) but still have to deal with Birch in order to get switched. Suddenly they finally (seemingly) put us with a person who is actually trying to help get our phones back up. As I write this our phones are still not ringing so I can't relay the true end of this story. It doesn't really matter. Bottom line is we lost THOUSANDS of DOLLARS yesterday and have the same situation today. If you are a thrill-seeking risk taker, go ahead and use Birch. But if you like your business to run smoothly and have working phones at your fingertips, do your research and go with a company who can provide that. read more

I wish there was a way to give 0 stars. This company lies to customers to get them off the phone without actually helping them. My company was moving locations and we had just switched to Birch a few months prior due to one of those sales calls saying you don't have to do anything and we'll just save you a lot of money. When it came time to move, i called twice to schedule it, and they totally dropped the ball and never showed up. I called again to ask where they were and they said sorry, they will forward to my cell first thing monday morning. That didn't happen either and after countless hours on the phone, ended up they can't forward calls until after the move happens. Well, it's been 4 days since the move so far and I'm still on the phone trying to get in touch with the move department to get them to come out here. To make everything worse, there's 4 departments, the repair team, customer service team, the service delivery team, and the move team. Each time you call, you have to wait 20-40 minutes to talk to one team, who doesn't do anything for you and then has to transfer you to another team, that also can't help you and transfers you in an endless loop so you're left without a solution and wasted HOURS spent on your cell phone. *** UPDATE*** To make matters worse, it's been over 3 weeks now, and we still have NO PHONE service, AND i just got a bill for 3 lines, when I had asked to cut it down to 1 line at the time of the move!!! WHAT A JOKE! I'm on hold again with the billing department who automatically transferred me to the repair team assuming i had a problem with there still being no phone service, when i really wanted to talk to billing about the 3 lines vs. 1. After talking to billing, they transferred me to customer care... 40 min and counting... and so the never ending cycle in HELL continues... read more

Terrible! Birch Communications bought Globalinx, which was my landline service provider. My phone has not worked since last week. I called on Saturday, 6/6/15, and was told I would be contacted on Monday, 6/8/15. No call on Monday. I called again and was told my service ticket will be expedited. Today is Wednesday, 6/10/15, still no call back and no phone service. I called again and was told once more that my service ticket will be expedited. Seriously? What phone company does not have tech support on hand instead of customer service reps taking messages that obviously never get a response. Looking for new phone service provider today. I've had enough! read more

I have spent the last 10 days dealing with these people trying to get 1 phone line installed and its been an absolute NIGHTMARE. 3 times they were supposed to come out and no one showed any of those 3 times and I have spent hours on the phone trying to get answers. I have been shuffled around with promises of call backs and never receive them. Absolutely BY FAR the worst company Ive ever dealt with. Horrible. Avoid them if you have any other options. read more

I discontinued service back in December 2014, way after my contract was complete, and they continued to bill me after the fact. I paid for service through January 16. I was not physically in the location and they kept telling me I was liable for the bill. Customer service says they'll do one thing and then does another. They do not follow up. And now I'm in collections for money that I don't even owe. DO NOT USE THEM. NOT WORTH ANY MONEY SAVED. Headache after headache. read more

This company is the worst! It's expensive and my business line always seems to have problems on our busiest work days once every other month. I call for a technician and they tell me if the problem happens to fix itself by the time the tech gets here, they want to charge me $130! Seriously, go with any other phone company but this one. read more

Birch Communications misrepresents itself as saving you money. I was not happy being charged more than Century Link the first month so I sent them a cancellation letter in September. I received invoices after switching back to Century Link and then another bill in January for $200 cancellation fee. DO NOT USE THEM THEY SCREW OTHER BUSINESSES. UNETHICAL BUSINESS PRACTICES. Slow internet, many disruptions the worse I have ever used. Forget getting any intelligent person to trouble shoot or handle complaints. You get the run around. read more

Birch bought out cbeyond and they are terrible. Customer support is hardly award winning as they advertise. Anytime you call, you have to listen to endless tapes and sit on hold forever. average one hour. I had an issue with business lines over the weekend and they lied and did not get local tech support as promised. When tech support came out on Monday, that was the first they had heard of an issue. The told me they are on call and would have gotten me fixed if Birch had sent them an repair order on the previous Friday. I am switching companies now and cannot get anyone from Birch on the line to discuss the transition. Horrible company. Avoid in my opinion. read more

We originally signed on with Cbeyond, which was bought by Birch. When Birch's first bill showed up we sent the payment to the same address. Well a month later our phones were DISCONNECTED! They claimed they "never got paid" yet failed to even email or call us to let us know, so they just pulled the plug??!? Who does that you ask? BIRCH DOES. Now we have a mid sized business with 10 lines and get most our sales by phone. It took over a day to get up and running and was a horrible experience. Oh and just wait when you try to change services... They hold your phone numbers hostage... Stay away... Just went with Telepacific way more professional. read more

If they call you, HANG UP. Like many of the other reviews I've seen, they called our office pretending to be our current carrier. They were fast-talking and bullying and wouldn't slow down at all when I tried to get clarification as to exactly what they were changing on our phone lines. As they claimed to be our current provider, I asked them to walk line by line through our phone bill with me and explain exactly where the changes would be made and they said they can't see the bill. After getting transferred to a supervisor, and going through the entire thing again, I finally figured out they were NOT our current provider. When I asked about our international rates/plans he told me they don't offer an international plan, it would be minute by minute charges, but then he recommended I use some other international code before each of my calls as he does when he calls his wife in Afghanistan. I seriously wonder if he really has a wife in the armed services or if it was just part of the scam. I did manage to get off the phone without committing to anything. I have to admit, if it weren't for the fact I have already been going through our bill with our provider with a fine-toothed comb lately, I totally would've fallen for it. I am sure they get many many many customers on the hook with their deceptive fast-talking practices. read more

DO NOT FALL FOR THIS. They outright lied about the rates the double spin it when you give the voice confirmation. I asked the first two sales people specifically if there was any form of contract and they said NO. They said I would receive the extremely low rate for 36 months. read more

As others have stated, I would prefer a "no star" rating for this company. I am beyond frustrated with Birch. In October 2015, I mailed out, not only one but two notices to Birch to insure that they had notice that we were canceling our service with them. I gave them more than 90 days notice. In January we did successfully port over our lines to the new provider. Last week I received an invoice from them for services past our cancellation date. When I contacted them they stated "The notice you sent was never received by Birch. The address you sent it to is our billing address that only processes payment." Really? Suggestion to anyone trying to cancel services with Birch, GET A CONFIRMATION OF CANCELLATION! I am hoping that they will not try to charge me an early termination fee. read more

Worst ever.... I am trying to reach them right now for tech support and have been holding for 22 minutes. This, after I reached them earlier with another lengthy wait and was disconnected when they asked me to hold again for a different department. read more

No Stars. Signed a contract at the end of July 2016. We are still waiting ! Nothing has been done. Do not work with Birch. read more

If I could give this company a zero, I would totally do so. I gave notice to them in October 2015, that I would not be renewing my contract. I had to send numerous emails to different people, my service is still not been complete terminated. They owe me money for months that that they continued to charge me. I was told by their billing department to contact my bank and not allow there charges to be accepted. I have now been told that my contract was renewed, without my knowledge and that we are going to have to pay $2000 for early termination. NEVER DO BUSINESS WITH THIS AWFUL COMPANY!!!!! read more

Sign up with Birch AYOR. I am honestly surprised that they have not been closed down by the FCC. Deceptive practices, bullying, and hugely overpriced service - all this served by ignorant and rude representatives. Try to discontinue your service? They will threaten and bully you, They sign you up by pretending they are your local phone company; once they get your OK to provide service, they say they will send you the agreement to sign; they never do. ANYTIME you want to discontinue service, and I did after several years of suffering in their hands, they will slap you with a huge early termination fee. If you ask to see the contract where you agreed to an early termination fee, they will say it is in the mail. If you do not pay the termination fee ($300) they insinuate they will ruin your credit record. This must be the most manipulative telecommunications company in the US; its practices hark to the days of the mafia. Sadly, they are still around. Sadly YELP does not offer an option for ZERO stars. read more

If you think about using Birch, run, fast to another company!!! I have been trying to get phone service set up since December 31, 2014 and today is January 26, 2015. Worst customer service experience I have had in my whole life. They subcontract everything through AT&T and when AT&T went out to help they told me they couldn't speak to me about the line issues. What???? Birch is the worst company I have ever tried to work with and like the other reviewer said, they don't even deserve one star. read more

We used Cbeyond previously for hosting our website and never had any issues. Cbeyond was bought out by Birch Communications. Our website has been down for over 8 hours, costing of 15-20k. We understand that these problems happen, but not for this long and with a lack of communication. I would only expect to be down for this long if there was a natural disaster, fire, etc. They obviously do not have redundancy in their network and we are finding out the hard way. With the amount of ISP's available to choose from, I would look elsewhere for your hosting needs. read more

STAY AWAY!!!! Birch contacted my business and talked me into switching from AT&T to them. After hanging up with them, I immediately checked on Birch Communications reviews. Scared me to death. I did not see ONE good review. So I called back 10 -20 minutes later to tell them to cancel my order. I talked to a "LISA" and asked for a confirmation number or her id number in case they didn't cancel. She would not give me no number, but GUARENTEED me that it would not go through since it hasn't left their department yet and as I was on the phone with her, she was canceling it. Well...got the mail today...a few weeks later from talking to Lisa, I GOT A BILL FROM, BIRCH!!! I called them and they said there is no note or anything of me calling to cancel and there was nothing I could do about it. AAHHHHHHHHHHHHHH! Besides that, the bill was higher then what the first gentleman who signed me up, quoted me. I called AT&T and they were SO HELPFUL and nice to get me back to them. They even cancelled the fee!!! I even got my bill lowered! PLEASE...don't go with this company! They made me use words I never used on a phone :( read more

Not much to add to all the other negative reviews. Was told it was part of AT & T and that they had a new program that would cost us less monthly PLUS we were entitled to a rebate . First sign of trouble was we had no long distance service. Two days of hell . Canceled service , found out we had been switched. Got our first bill and it was $146 for two days of local calls !!! Now I just got the threat letter for $1750 disconnect charge. Don"t understand how this can be possibly legal. read more

We went through a process of terminating our service, because they could not provide us service at our new location. We even paid them till the end of the contract. A year later they charge us $1,600+ and say it was a early termination penalty. They automatically took it out of our bank, and automatically renewed our service even though we spent hours of time making sure they knew we were terminating there service for good on the last contract. We call them up they say nothing they can do. They are thieves do not do business with this company. read more

0 out of 5 starts. Do not use Birch!! You will receive bills, but your phone lines never get moved. Even when you call to disconnect, they will continue to bill you and say their "work order" did not detail a disconnection OR they never received notification from another service. read more

These guys are a bad bunch to deal with. Typical with big business these days, they make it terribly difficult to correct "errors" bordering on crooked. Certainly un-ethical and not the way we treat our customers. BTW we HAD been a customer for 15 years read more

I have some experience with getting out of Birch's scam, so please read the rest of this review if you are being hit with their scam and are scared/don't know what to do. First, some background. Birch contacted us masquerading as AT&T and asked us if we wanted to lower our business phone bill. One time, we said yes after emphatically asking them if they were AT&T. We signed nothing and they proceeded to switch our line over after doing third-party verification (that voice robot thing you said yes to). So basically, our number was slammed, that is taken without our informed consent. They have been slapped down for this before by the FCC, by the way: https://www.fcc.gov/document/birch-communications-inc-slamming-order-2 I tried calling their customer service and manager. They would not let us out of the fraudulent contract without a cancellation fee of 50% of the supposedly agreed-upon 3-year contract, amounting to ~$1700. We were really scared, but we got out of it! There is hope! What we did was port the number over to another provider ASAP. Get your number out of their control, so they can't do something like cut your phone, release the number to the public, etc. Any legitimate phone company can do this, or you can even use something like Ooma, which is around $4/month for us. Just do something. Once you do this, it will trigger their system to send you a termination fee threat letter. For us, this was about $1700. Take this to your state's public utility commission (PUC). For us in California, we could just file a complaint on their website. Probably if you search "your state + public utilities commission + complaint", you'll get it. I explained that their acquisition of us as customers was done under false pretenses and that they lied about who they were. I also uploaded a scanned-in version of the monthly bill and the statement with the termination fee. I asked the PUC for absolution from the bill and termination fees. About a month later, Birch sent me a letter and CC'd to the PUC stating that they had followed all the rules, but as a favor to us, they will make the balance zero. Such nice people, I know. They weren't so nice when I called them on the phone. Personally, I think they just didn't want any more investigation. Bottom line: if you get this scam, report Birch to the public utilities commission for your state. I think they figure that for every one customer that puts up a fight, they'll scare ten into submission. Don't let that be you. It's also better if you jump on this early before you've made payments to them. Remember, you probably didn't sign anything and all that happened was a salesman did whatever it took to get your number ported and then is doing everything they can to stop you from realizing what you accidentally did. Do not pay any bills they send you if they scammed you this way. They probably don't have your card/bank info anyway. Just report to the PUC. Hope this helps someone. read more

I would not even give this company a 1 star! If you have any type of problem you CAN NOT get a hold of them. Once you do a couple hours later, they have an excuse to why you couldn't reach them. Also I found this out while trying to find some way to contact them via email support or some other means when the phones where down for an ENTIRE BUSINESS DAY. Take a look: http://www.fiercetelecom.com/telecom/birch-pays-6-1m-to-settle-fcc-billing-marketing-investigation read more

This is a complete scam and they should not be in business!!! They scammed me by posing as and AT&T representative and then when I started getting bills and technicians showed up to change our modem, I realized something was fishy. I tried to cancel my account with them and was told it would be $1800!!! They never provided any services prior to the request for cancellation. It is now in a billing dispute that they claim will take up to 30 days to process. I was duped and they are deceitful and doing horrible business if they have to trick people into letting them provide service and then not letting people out of the contract. I spoken with 5 representatives to date and of the 5 three of them were very rude, defensive and unhelpful!!! It makes me think they deal with angry people a lot. DO NOT DO BUSINESS WITH BIRCH!!! read more

The WORST WORST WORST company. Absolutely NO customer service. I have had weeks worth of intermittent phone line outage as well as internet outage. I have made several calls to the company reporting the issue. All they did was do some looking on their end and do circuit tracing -- which is some hocus pocus "turn some switches on there end to fix it" That's such bullshit. They never fixed the problem. No one calls back. No sense of urgency to fix a problem. The chronic problem was never fixed until I demamded ( emphasize demamded) someone real and alive come out to look. Low and behold it was their equipment that was broken. Since the fix, 1 of the 4 lines don't work and they are now accusing me of faulty phones. They want me to hire an IT guy to look at it. WTF I pay hundreds a month for service! More calls to have the repair man return has been met with such stonewalling techniques! "we will call you back in 4 hours" ...LOL that was 8 hours ago. I have to call them AGAIN. When I ask to speak with a manager...I was told they "don't take incoming calls" ...what type crap is that? Base on nothing but 1 star rating its obvious Birch is a ROTTEN ROTTEN ROTTEN company!!! read more

Out of the blue they cut off all international calling. A complete breach of my contract. Guess they think they can drag out having to honor their contract because they know we are leaving. Have two months left on plan. Looks like everyone has been squewed by this unbelievably dishonest company. Hope there is a class action. read more