Verizon
Crippling companies ability to do business due to their policies and procedures, ripoff

Here's the story:
Our company has DSL and domain names through Verizon. This service was purchased years ago. When it was purchased, they required us to provide them with an e-mail address. This e-mail address that we provided was NOT an e-mail address with our domain name extension that we were purchasing from Verizon.

Not too long ago, some of our customers called to let us know that e-mails they had sent to us were bouncing back with failed delivery. We contacted Verizon right away to find out what was wrong.

According to someone in their billing department, our services were shut down because they hadn't received a response to three e-mails that Verizon had sent to us at the "old" e-mail address that we had to provide to them when we first set up. They didn't send us anything to the e-mail addresses that we were purchasing from them.

We always pay our bill. It wasn't a billing issue at all. Our service was shut down purely on the fact that we hadn't responded to those 3 e-mails.

So, not only do they shut down our e-mail but they discontinued our DSL. It had already been in the process of being shut down as we called them.

Anyway, when speaking to the billing department, we asked why they didn't call us at the phone # that is on the bill that they send us every month? Their response was "We don't do that."

At this point we had talked to about 5-6 different people at Verizon trying to resolve this problem. Only one of those people treated us like a customer. All the others treated us and our problem like dirt. Like our business isn't important.

On 2/10/06, they told us that our DSL service was discontinued and before any of this could get fixed, we would have to sign up for DSL again and that it would be taken care of as quickly as possible.

Well, now it's 2/15/06 and we still don't have e-mail and our customers are still calling us in a panic thinking that we shut our doors.

This morning, after hearing the grief that my fellow employees were going through while trying to deal with Verizon, I offered to give Verizon a call and get this resolved. Certainly, Verizon would see their mistake and try to fix it ASAP... Right?

The story continues: I call and find out the same thing. They can't do anything until their DSL department gets us hooked up again. I asked to talk to a manager but was told the managers in the department that I was talking to had nothing to do with the DSL department and couldn't help at all.

So, I call the DSL department. I tell them the entire story (the lady I was talking to seemed to understand and I really think she wanted to help). She tells me that there is no way to expedite this service. That it was up to a computer to give us an IP address and there was nothing in place to speed that up.

Ok... When will the almighty computer decide that we can start doing business again? She replied that the computer will choose an IP address on the 21st of February.

I told her that was not acceptable and that they are crippling our business. Nothing they can do. That's the way it is and that there isn't ANYTHING that they can do.

I asked to speak to her supervisor. She said that I can but they can't do anything either. She told me that she was already talking to them and that they were aware of my situation. They can't help you either.

Basically, the message I got was that if Verizon is taking care of some of your business needs, you are at their mercy. When they make a mistake, your business suffers and they have no procedures or policies in place to undo mistakes that they make.

We are now shopping for someone locally to handle our business needs. Someone that actually wants our business and will do what it takes to maintain our business.

PS. After I got off the phone with them this morning, we checked the mail.in the mail was a bunch of hardware for hooking up DSL from Verizon. Heh... We already have all that in place because we were already hooked up with DSL. Doesn't make much business sense does it? Just shipping stuff off to people that already have the items? It's clear that they have no idea what they are doing. Their infrastructure must be so messed up that they really must be spinning their wheels.

Bottom line:

1) Verizon turns off our e-mail and DSL because we didn't repond to an e-mail.

2) They can't fix the problem because it's up to a computer to fix it and the computer won't be ready to fix the problem for more than 10 days.

3) Verizon effectively shut our business down even though we pay our bill on time every time.

Shea
Troutdale, Oregon
U.S.A.

Company: Verizon
Country: USA
State: Pennsylvania
City: West Chester
Address: 616 Brandywine Parkway
Phone: 8884834111

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