My wife and I saw the add on TV for "in network" calling and thought it would be perfect so she called and had it added to our plan. It was a simple and painless procedure. Our next bill was $1500.00! That is 10X more than normal.
I have been a customer of the same wireless company for about 16 years. Though the names have changed I stuck with them through thick and thin, with all the poor service and billing problems, and up to this point at least have been frustrated at times but at least the problems were resolved and I continued my service.
Now things have changed. There is no customer service now. Trying to resolve a simple issue is futile.
Upon receiving our $1500 bill my wife called Verizon to clear up the matter after all errors do occur, it is unavoidable. To her surprise she was informed by a Verizon rep that "we used the minutes - pay the bill". When my wife said that the bill could not be right the reply was "mam, you can see for yourself, those are the minutes you used...". My wife could not get the girl to help us find out why our bill was so high! Oh, she did offer to spread the payments over 6 months, thanks.
We went on line to get a copy of our bill and within 30 seconds found the first error! One call was 1100 minutes! Anyone could see it was an error because there was a 20 hour call with only 7 hours until the next billed call.
This information was given to Verizon. We thought this little episode was over though we were a little upset over the lack of help from Verizon customer service on this matter, but occassionally with any company you get a bad apple.
A few days latter I get a call saying that we are only getting a $500 or so credit. I told the rep that called that this of course still could not be right and if it was then we had a serious problem that needed to be fixed. She said she agreed, it still did not seem right, she would talk to her manager. Never heard from her again and she will not return our calls.
The next thing we know one day we have no service. We call Verizon and a rep tells us our bill is late. This was now becoming a nightmare instead of nuisance. The rep says that the account was reveiwed, a determination was made, thats what we owed, now pay the bill if you want service. Still no explanation about why it is still 700 dollars too high! Oh and now to add insult to the situation we find our next bill to be over $400 and we had used the phones very little until we resolved the problem.
After talking to more reps the only response we could get was "well those are the minutes you used (dummy), you need to pay the bill". No one would help us figure out why our bill was out of control!
We finally began to try analyzing the bill ourselves, which is nearly impossible but when we noticed that we were being charged for minutes that were from so called "in network" calls we breathed a collective sigh of relief for we had found the rest of the problem... Or so we thought.
Once again a call to Verizon dredges up yet another unknowledgable and uncaring rep. When told of the new mistake we found the response was immediately, "well if you had read your contract you would know that "in network" calling counts against your minutes if you are in "extended network".
Wait a minute! What contract? We added the "in network calling" by phone. There was no contract! We accepted at face value what we saw on TV. Verizon phone to Verizon phone is supposed to be free! The ad on TV did not say "free except for...". So now we owe an extra $900.00 (above the legitimate charges).
I now understand why so many people hate Verizon now. I had heard so many horror stories but did not believe they were true. You know some of the stories are really bad, much worse than mine, thats really scary!
It is very sad that a company can not work to reslove a simple issue or help a customer that stuck with them 16 years. Oh well I guess change is good. We shall move on.
PS We were getting ready to drop a couple of extra land lines at our business and add three cell phones because of the "in network calling". Thank goodness we learned our lesson before we added the phones!
Thomas
Winston Salem, North Carolina
U.S.A.
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