Verizon Troubles

I have had a week of Verizon customer service issues. It's been a nightmare. Frustrated, I shot off the following email to Ivan Seidenberg, the CEO of Verizon.

Mr. Seidenberg,

I am a portfolio manager and have met you time and again. However, I write you today as a customer. It is incredible to me, as both a customer and investor, at the level of conglomerate bureaucracy that Verizon customer service is. Up until very recently, I was a Verizon FIOS customer. I lauded the service to all who would listen. However, recently I was transferred from New York to Minnesota. As you are well aware, Minnesota is not a FIOS area.

I rented my house to a tenant who wished to keep Verizon. I spoke to four different customer service representatives who each told me something completely different about whether the tenant could assume my Verizon equipment. At the end of the day, it was determined (for reasons that do not make sense to me) that they could not assume my equipment. Since I did not want to lose my @verizon.net email addresses, I chose not to cancel my Internet service right away. I was willing to keep paying for FIOS without using it. However, the new tenant was unable to establish their own equipment unless I terminated my account. Consequently, a representative in Fiber Solutions in Syracuse instructed me to cancel my service, call back customer service to have my email “enabled.” Such action, I was told, would allow me to keep my email accounts for another 20-30 days. I followed his instructions, terminated by account, only to be told by someone else in Fiber Solutions that they had no idea what the former representative was talking about.

An escalation specialist, Enid – also in Syracuse, was helpful but in the end unable to do much. She (somehow) re-established my emails for 24 hours ending today. She called DSL/Dial-up Sales on my behalf to determine that I could get a dial-up account and keep my emails. However, when we called together another dial-up sales person, we were both told that in fact, no she was wrong. I couldn’t establish a dial-up account in Minnesota.

Today, I got a voicemail from yet another Fiber Solutions representative who instructed me to call Dial-Up and gave me a number to call. The number didn’t work. I tried to activate a Dial-Up account on-line on a specific dial-up account setup website, and received a message half-way through the process that the website wasn’t working correctly. It instructed me to call yet another (800) number. That (800) number did not service dial-up accounts. That person transferred me to a dial-up representative. After waiting on hold for 15-minutes, I was not in-fact transferred to dial-up sales and had to be transferred yet again.

Finally, the dial-up representative for New York, told me that I could not establish a dial-up account because I did not have a Verizon phone number in New York. Why I need a Verizon phone number so that I can dial into the Verizon network is beyond me! If I were traveling across the country, and needed to dial in, it would not matter what type of phone I used to do so. I attempted to use a relative’s NY phone number to establish the account, but was told I would have to call FIOS to establish an account because the number was associated with FIOS sales. That relative with a traditional landline Verizon phone, does not have FIOS! Determined, I tried calling the Minnesota Verizon number – waited on hold for 25 minutes, but no one answered. What’s even crazier is that I don’t intend to actually use the service! All I want is to keep my email addresses.

So, after speaking with eight different representatives (including two supervisors), waiting on hold for a grand total of 45 minutes or more, I have multiple, mutually-exclusive solutions to my problem that no one can seem to do in their own department, yet when I call those departments, they have no idea what I’m talking about. The answers I receive make no logical sense to someone who clearly understands how the telephone/internet infrastructure works.

In the end, I am trying to throw money at Verizon, and no one seems to want it. It is truly unbelievable.

A disgruntled former customer and puzzled investor,
Bill Moore

Can you believe, he personally responded within an hour, and the SVP of Customer Service was on the phone to me within a half an hour of that. I'm impressed with that.