I live in a small pocket of Verizon surrounded by miles and miles of Pacific Bell/AT&T customers. This is a “funny” joke pulled on my city of 60,000 people by the idiots on the California Public Utilities Commission.in December 06, I signed up for Verizon DSL. The first time it was offered (much later than other companies, you’ll notice) and the ONLY service available in my little patch of electronic hell.
From 12/06 though 12/07, I logged over 200 service tickets with Verizon for lost connections and inability to get DSL service. Yes, 200 – and I work two jobs and only have one day off a week! So, that should tell you something about their reliability! This year, I finally found out that you could get action if you made connection with the executive offices on the east coast at 800-483-7988.
One of the reasons I stuck with the service and didn’t revert back to dial up (my only option, as the cable here is worse) is that I was told that my service would cost $14.95 a month for life.
Verizon raised my rate this past month, so I spent over 2 and half hours on the phone, during my vacation, calling several continents to find out how to get this fixed. This morning, I received a call and was told that in order to provide “customer retention” I was going to be allowed to keep the service for $14.95 for one more year, and then it would go to what ever rate they wanted.
They insist that they never offered that rate to me. They stated that it was only offered during the month of November to new customers, that I was not entitled to the rate at all. I, however, clearly remember the conversation. So, warning to all consumers – record every call you make to a utility. I have now purchased a record-a-call handset and am going to do just that.
Customer Service? Are you kidding? What a rip off. They are quick to make promises to keep you hanging so that you don’t tell everyone what crappy service you’re getting and then when they finally get it right and it works – they screw you. You’d think I’d have paid my dues just by putting up with it for so long.
I estimate that the 200 tickets alone took up at least $10,000 of my time. Plus the times I just didn’t want to be bothered spending hours on the phone to get my service working. Apparently Verizon doesn’t believe customers’ time has value. They can’t even part with $60 a year.
So, before you think of going with Verizon – do you really want to go through what I’ve gone through?
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