Verizon Customer (Dis-) Service
April 21, 2003
What is it about telcos in general, and Verizon in particular, that makes them just not get it? I’ve had the dubious fortune of living in a GTE (”Giant Telephone Experiment”), now Verizon area for 19 years. Pretty much without exception, in each of those years I’ve spent a total of at least one, sometimes as many as three business days, on the phone dealing with their customer service.
During that time, I’ve kept two lines; even after the dial-in days were done, I kept a second line for business purposes. Recently I decided to go to Vonage for my second line, and cancel the Verizon line—the Vonage line was cheaper per month, even before I considered unmetered long distance in the US and Canada.
Today I got a letter from a collection agency, collecting for Verizon. I was confused—the amount didn’t match what I owed on either one (the existing one or the final bill on the canceled one), and I wasn’t overdue….
I called the collection agency, about midway between baffled and livid—they asked “did you recently cancel service?”. Yep. “Oh, that explains it—Verizon automatically sends the final bill to us when someone cancels service.” Nevermind that the bill is still 8 days away from being due.
To add injury to insult, Verizon had charged me $35 for a “referral message” for 90 days on the old number, at my request. Unfortunately, every time I’ve tried it, it wasn’t there (I just got a “number not in service” message). It was on my to-do list to call them this week and ask for a credit. When I mentioned this to the collection agency, they told me that essentially if I didn’t pay them the amount today, it’d show up on my credit report.
So let’s check the bidding—first off, assume that a customer leaving is a deadbeat, and refer them to a credit agency automatically. Then, as long as we know they’re going to have difficulty disputing anything, let’s see if we can gouge them for an unprovided service.
This kind of behavior suited the telcos fine when they were the only game in town—our copper, our lines, we own your ass.
When are they going to wake up and realize that the times have changed?
Yes, I’m still essentially captive to them for my landline; while I like Vonage a lot, lack of 911 support and dependance on the reliability of my broadband carrier make me reluctant to have them be my only line, but it’s a very close thing indeed. If it wasn’t for worrying about my kids being able to call 911, I’d risk being able to use my cellphone for that, and for service if there was a broadband problem.
In the case of a second line, where lifeline services weren’t involved, shooting Verizon was a no-brainer.
Likewise, I just recently got a new cellphone. Although Verizon is a major local cellphone player, I didn’t even consider them, due to past experiences with their customer support.
They’ve been offering long distance service for a few years now; again, I’ve never considered them due to my experience with first GTE, now it’s Verizon incarnation.
Wherever I’ve had a choice, Verizon has lost around $140 a month from me now so far. Do you suppose today’s experience has made me more likely to choose them in the future?
Not a chance.
Update - November 2005
Sorry folks; comments are now closed. I’ve recently started getting a rash of people who are so confused they think they’re writing to Verizon’s customer service.
This ain’t Verizon, people — if you’ve got a problem with them, get on the phone and and wait half a day like the rest of us.
Leaving a comment here wouldn’t help regardless — just read and enjoy, and know that if misery loves company, there’s a whole lot of us who have been in the same boat with you.
I am a new user of Verizon DSL and I have not
received messages for 3 days. Finally today I
called my nextdoor neighbor in and he helped me.
I could not get through to Verizon or a customer
service person. I am on the verge of quitting
Verizon and getting another server like ComCast or
AOL. How do I get another human being on the line
to speak to me?????
Jennie if you check back, please send me any help info you receive! I am a one-week customer of this Verizon DSL and all I can say is DSL must stand for do-slowly & lockup. Don’t they have an e-mail address for customer service? Right! My aol-dial up is faster. I’m with you - no humans, no help. Good luck.
Verizon promised to mail me a rabate for $50 over 6 months ago. After contacting them 2 weeks ago, they said they would reissue the check since I didn’t get it. Now they say they cannot issue it since the time limit is up. One way or other I will get the money!
I switched my local and long distance telephone to Verizon in order to get the DSL, since I currently am on dialup. I put in the order to switch in mid-June. Somehow, Verizon did not get the order straight until I made 4 or 5 calls and then they only switched the telephone in the beginning of July and told me the DSL would take 5-7 days to install and that they would be sending a modem. First few days of July passed with no modem and no message from Verizon regarding the DSL. I went online and the only page I could pull up was that the order status page was experiencing technical difficulties and I could not get the status. So I tried calling and tried and tried. I made about 6 calls only to be told after hour long waits on hold, that the order had been cancelled. Why? Becuase they were “testing for a dialtone” and it was not showing service. But the phone was in service since July 1. No matter. The computer tried to find a dialtone on the line and couldn’t find it so the order was cancelled. I had them re order it. But smartly, I thought, I would call or check online a couple of days later—guess what, nothing showed online, had the ol’ error message. When I finally got through to tech support, a Ms. Perkins, she told me that the order had been cancelled, again. That not enough time had gone by for them to check the line. When I became irate and said I might as well go back to Comcast, she scolded me for talking to her in a “tone of voice” and said that she was cancelling the order. Shocked, I said, I have your name and she said, well, it’s not my real name anyway and hung up on me. How’s that for customer service. So I called again, and got connected (after TWO HOURS on hold) to their customer advocacy team, who, like all the others, expressed their great sorrow at how I had been treated and said they really couldn’t do anything to help, except put in another order which would take another two weeks. Well, I figured three strikes and they’re out. So it’s been a week, and although I have been able to see the status online, I have received no email, no modem, and tonight, when I checked the status online, I got the dreaded error message that said due to technical difficulties, my order status could not be accessed. So I called the customer advocate line again, and was put on hold for another half hour and just hung up because, beleive it or not, I have other things to do than wait on the phone for VErizon to respond to customers. Which is what they must be counting on.
Deborah, I can sympathize—I had one or two adventures like that with GTE (and then Verizon, after the merger) most every year for about 20 years. It never ceased to amaze me.
My all-time favorite was calling in trouble tickets on an ISDN line. The tarrifs at that time at least required them to respond to a trouble ticket within 24 hours, and they’d always call back to report “no trouble found”, although it would mysteriously start working before they did.
Shortly after the merger, I had the opportunity to talk to a couple of their line men who were out fixing various things, and the stories they’d tell about staffing levels and quality control would just boggle my mind. One guy was their “DSL Expert”, and he told me he’d been an HVAC repairman for the last few years, and had only been with Verizon for about 6 weeks…
I HATE THESE CAPITALIST PIGS!!! And I hate more that I am so dependant on them. They decided to disconnect our DSL last week and when we called to find out why, they didn’t know! The bill is connected to our bank account and is automatically paid each month, so that wasn’t the reason. Every time we call to find out why or when we can have it back up, we get transferred around to a minimum of three “customer service” people, all reading from their little scripts with absolutely no individual authority to do ANYTHING! I asked the last person I spoke with what group sits above his department–who is between him and the President? He didn’t know. He knew he had a supervisor but that’s it. Unbelievable that these people have been so successful when they don’t follow any of the well-known rules of customer service. I know who the President of my company is, and every person and department below him. And if I didn’t, I know where and how to find that information. Damn that Verizon.
Im 75 years old and physically challenged. I use my PC for a window to the world and keeping in touch with my friends and relations world wide. I had pretty good service with my DSL when I first joined last May…then in Dec. 04..I stopped hearing from my daughter, son, and brother-inlaw in Iceand…I was getting my letters forwarded to me by my other son in LA using another server…So I started tracking my problem checking my spam blocker, and then I WENT TO VERIZON…they started a trouble ticket…(oh boy)they appologized for any inconvinence and told me the problem would be handled…3 weeks went by and I went O/L to check the ticket on their Verizon Site…the ticket had been cancelled and no fix…so they reopened it..this is having spent numerous times on line and on the phone waiting and listening to robots trying to find the problem by giving me dumb options or asking generic questions…so now after almost 3 months the problem is not solved…I am going to cancel when my contrasct is up in may and go to another DSL service through Warner Cable…I just hope it will be a little better…Oh yes, they called me and told me the problem was fixed…NOT..it only got worse as more of my friends in Iceland dropped off…VERIZON SUCKS.
My son applied for a job with Verizon in their Douglas, Ga store. He had a drug problem at one time in his past and had been in a little trouble in his younger days, so we decided that he should be honest with them and tell them everything that he had ever done. He’s been straight now for a while and has turned his life completely around. We were told that he was more than qualified to do the job but he was too honest with them, so therefore, they could not hire him. Well, I’ve always believed that honesty was the best policy, but not in the case of Verizon. Of course, I also believe in giving someone a second chance, as long as they were upfront and honest with me to begin with. I guess if he had lied to them, he would have gotten the job, but what would have happened if they had found out the truth later? He would have been fired! So, I guess if you’ve ever messed up in your life, you’re damned if you do and damed if you don’t. I agree that Verizon is not what it says it is.
I work for DOH and DOH decided to block all e-mail from Verizon, and Verizon retaliated and blocked all mail from DOH, and where are we the users? This is a you what contest between two entitites. Hopefully, DOH will get this reconciled, but when I called Verizon beaucoup times, they denied all blame and told me it all DOH, when it was a combined effort. Finally found out from our DOH here. (By the way DOH is Department of Health.) Also the other day, could send no pics, then shortly after, no e-mail at all. When I called got the usual reader who went through the script. “Turn your computer off…let’s try this…call microsoft…” and on and on. When finally got back to them after 8 calls, they said it wasn’t them. Oh well, you know the rest (see above.)
If this doesn’t get resolved will go to roadrunner. I must say they do answer my calls, after a not too bad waiting time; however, their people don’t know their — from their elbow most of the time.
I googled “Verizon Customer Service Sucks” to see what would come up because I was seriously thinking of starting a website called “verizonsucks.com” and making it a place where people can vent 24/7 about the monstrosity known as Verizon.
I called them for months on end trying to get DSL. People right up the street have it from me, why the hell can’t I. After months of speaking to different people, spending countless hours on hold, reiterating my story to numerous verizon tech support staff and being given the false hope that perhaps there was a way for me to get it and then being told, “I don’t know who told you DSL was available in your area, but it’s not”, I finally requested to get their dial up service instead. After three weeks I finally got the installation disk and kept getting error messages. So I called customer support and a woman took all my information and supposedly set-up my new user name and password and email account. The next day the dial-up connection wasn’t working. When I called them back, the person I talked to said that they had no record of any account ever being set up for me. Thus ensued a week long battle of trying to figure out what the hell happened and eventually after being hung up on, dismissed, disconnected, and basically devalued as a customer who by the way has had both their local/long distance and cell phone service with them for the last 20 years - I told them I didn’t want their stupid dial up service and that I would be leaving Verizon because of their HORRIBLE customer service. It was a matter of principle now.
So I put in the switch to go to AT&T and I knew it was too good to be true. Everything went smoothly, my secondary line transferred over to AT&T within 4 days of placing the order on 8/5/05. However, it’s now 8/23 and I’ve spent the last three weeks on the phone with AT&T trying to resolve why my main line, the one that the billing is connected to, has yet to transfer. No one can give me a clear cut answer, I’m constantly calling speaking to people, reiterating my story. One rep. hung up on me last week because he said “he couldn’t listen to me anymore”. Don’t you love it? I’m paying a $60 transfer fee (per line!) to switch my service so I can spend countless hours and days on hold, wasting my time - and now I’m paying two separate phone companies for service this past month. They claim that Verizon may be putting up roadblocks to prevent the transfer from going through (which doesn’t surprise me) but no one can clearly say what is causing the problem and what is being done to fix it. It’s a non-stop nightmare that I can’t get out of. The kicker is that if I try to stop the transfer of the main line and switch the second line back to Verizon, they are going to charge me a hefty transfer fee as well. I also ordered AT&T dial up service on 8/5 and still have yet to receive my start-up disk.
They all ROT!!!! I hate them all!
I ended up here looking for kindred spirts. I recently blogged my own miserable experiences with Verizon here. I’m sorry to see that I’m not alone.
I got to this site because I want to cancel my verizon on line dsl service, but cannot find a phone number or a means of canceling by email either. This is certainly highway robbery.
I stumbled onto this site after *trying* to take up Verizon’s new 14.95 slow DSL offer–I figured it had to be better than my dial-up–only to be repeatedly directed to the much more expensive FIOS package. The whole thing came to a crashing halt with a systems malfunctioning message. There seems to be no way to get to the DSL deal. But after reading thse comments, maybe Verizon really *is* doing me a favor?
Recently I have seen a commercial on tv for $14.95 DSL. But, I can’t remember which compnay it was. This commercial boasted 14.95 permanently, I do not think it was Verizon, ATT maybe? Anyone who has recently seen this commercial, please let me know. I have seen it mainly in the am with the morning news. Thanks!
It is Verizon offering the $14.95 offer and you can find it on their site if you type in your phone number for the DSL. I know somebody who has signed up for it already and they absolutely love it. I’m not a big fan of Verizon either…but who is a fan of their phone company…I’ve never had one that I’ve liked…
I am a 55 year old disabled person. My sister gave me a computer so we could E-mail eaach other and save on longdistance bills. Somebody got a hold of my name and began to charge on my telephone bill. AT first I paid a bill of $750.00 which is all the money I had in the bank. A few days later I found out that they had charged an additional $1,000.00 I called the telephone company and told them what had happened, they gave me a number to call and I did. Everything was supposed to be settled. Now my telephone has been shut off. I am here alone with no telephone. I do not know what to do>
Yesterday, after being on hold for one hour and fifty five minutes, I gave up trying to contact Verizon to change my California telephone service. Today, as I write this I have been on hold for one hour and ten minutes and still listening to canned music. Is there no one or no government body which can come to grips with this arrogant, insensitive, moneygrabbing monopoly? Perhaps the webmaster (webmistress) could send all of these complaints to whoever in the government system is supposed to be watching over public utilities. Isn’t it strange that a company purportng to sell communications services refuses to communicate with its (captive) customers.
Lorne;
The government system involved is individual in each state — in most states it’s the Public Utility Commission.
Way back when I worked more closely with Telcos, complaining to the PUC did have an effect — they didn’t tend to help on individual complaints, but when the Telco appeared before them to ask for rate changes or permission for other special dispensations, the PUC would drag out the file of complaints, and use them to beat up the Telcos regarding their request. As a result, they usually would go out of their way to try to avoid PUC complaints.
I’d suggest you file a complaint with your own state’s PUC regarding your treatment; it can’t hurt.
- Chuck
My Verizon DSL decided to stop working last week. I followed their instructions to disconnected everything and restarted, but it is still not working. I’ve been trying to reach their customer service in the past five days. Each time I gave up after being put on hold for over 30 mins. I am exhausted and therefore, I decided to cancel my DSL. Today, I decided to wait no matter what. Finally after 40 mins, a woman picked up the call. I was told she cannot cancel it for me because cancellation team does not work on Sundays. I almost get fainted. That means I have to work on the crap next week!!!!!!!!!! It is robbery!!!!!!I am so frustrated. After a busy day at work, I have to do this for relaxation?
Please call XXX-XXX-XXXX a.s.a.p! I am completely frustrated with the verizon service you offer. It took me days to get through to a living being, an appointment was set up for October 14th. i waited at home the entire day and no repairman ever came or called to tell me they would’nt come. Once again today could get no one to answer at Verizon repair. Expecting some resolution to this problem promptly. I have planned an appointment for next friday, but I would rather have someone come sooner, no other sooner date that I was available for was given to me online. I would like someone to come sooner, but the only day I will not be available on wednsday or thursday, the 19th, and the 20th. Please solve this problem quickly!
(edited to remove number)
Um, Viv –
This ain’t Verizon — this is people bitching about Verizon. Posting a message here and demanding that they call you is about the one thing even more useless than trying to talk to them on the phone…
‘kay?