This is my first time officially complaining about a customer service experience. My travails with Verizon have escalated to the most egregious experience I've had, but ironically Verizon has done nothing to escalate this to anything but a series of screwups and customer service debacles.
We switched to Verizon FiOS in June—cable, phone and internet. That was our only mistake. The real problem, though, became the phone. During the summer our phone would become disconnected. It happened at least once a month. I was told that nothing was wrong, but that there was a work order in the system for Aug. 16. No one seemed to know what it was, but it did seem to cause a problem, so tech kept trying to delete it. After losing all my voice mail messages twice and even having my voicemail access number changed on me—by that time I had spent approx. 300 minutes on my cell phone with them—I was told everything was taken care of. The frustration just getting to talk to someone for those 300 minutes was enough to make me scream. The phone trees and the voice automaton are maddening. The computer operator cannot even distinguish clearly and loudly spoken native English.
On October 10, I lost my service again. Back to the phone tree. Please understand that through all this no one and I mean not one single tech or customer service person took ownership of this problem. So when I finally was able to talk to an agent about yet again losing service, I was told that it would be fixed. Two days later, nothing. Then I was told that someone would need to come to my house because of the nature of the problem. The day came and went. I waited all morning and then some. "Oops. We canceled the technician." Your problem is not what we thought. NO phone call to tell me this.
The first phone call I received from anyone in charge was on Friday late afternoon, Oct. 12, telling me that they spent four hours researching my problem and in June my phone had NEVER even been switched over to fiber optic. So work orders kept getting placed and cancelled and I kept getting my phone turned off because someone had no idea what they were doing. This is unbelievable in itself.
It doesn't end there, altho ugh I would think that once they knew the problem they would speedily do something about it. Renee in California (about the 10th rep I'd talked to, no exaggeration) told me that my phone could not be turned on until October 17, almost one week later. I hit the roof, but what could I do? October 17 came and went and no phone service, no courtesy call, no follow up AT ALL. Back to the phone tree. But this time I reached someone in the Customer Advocacy Office of the President. Sounds like it would be effective, doesn't it? Well, it was an experience in apathy and arrogance.in fact, the customer service branch that I dealt with in three different places was exactly the same. They just passed the buck, and, furthermore, told me that I didn't need to write the President because it would just come to them, and they would just ignore it since I had already called. During this whole debacle, NO ONE could tell me the proper channels to take to take this problem to the top. And not one person could tell me the name of Verizon's president. One customer service person (not tech) had to look it up on her computer. Customer Advocacy is for problems that have escalated to the point where there is no resolution in sight (that was definitely me). They blithely passed my problem to the Maryland office and told me that they could take care of everything—even getting credit on my bill. (I certainly wanted some sort of compensation.) That was Wednesday. Today, Friday, still no phone. Someone (no surprise at this point) put a November date in the computer to have it turned on! And they can't seem to get these dates out of the computer. I would just like to know what moron keeps entering these mysterious things into the computer. The frustrating thing is, no one at Verizon can seem to figure that out either. So no avenue of complaining or getting someone to take ownership. This is the pinnacle of incompetence and lazy, ignorant workmanship. And how do they train their customer service people? They train them to listen and do nothing and apparently feel nothing either.
Right now, one responsible person (Nick) in the Oxnard, Calif. Office has taken this on and hopes to get the November date out of the computer. But at this point I have absolutely no trust in Verizon, especially the Maryland office, nor do I believe that this is the end of my problems with them. One more note. My Verizon FiOS On Demand movies pixalize and lose sound—every single time we use this we have to reset our modem. Comcast was bad, but this is like the frying pan and the fire. Chris in Maryland
0 comments