I've been a Verizon customer since my first cell phone, must be 14 or 15 years now, and subscriber Verizon FIOS Internet, and TV services since it first came to this neighborhood. We've always paid our monthly bills on time and combined they are over $400 monthly now.
Verizon customer support seems to have deteriorated over the years, moving away from plain English-speaking Americans, then to Indian (I think) customer service reps in most cases who were often hard to understand, then to more automated and/or self-help methods (but back toward American sounding reps when you do get to a human), and what feels like a "make em tired so they give up" approach I have encountered both when making changes to phone plan and TV plan. It seems easy to use the website to make changes to mobile phone plan, or TV plan, or to Internet plan IF THOSE CHANGES WILL RESULT IN HIGHER MONTHLY RATE, but never the case if the changes will reduce customer's monthly charges.
When the monthly rate will be reduced by changes you want to make, there always seems to be the extra step and inconvenience of contacting Verizon customer support representative via chat, or phone call which will require automated menus followed by a wait, and eventually a human... Sometimes you get lucky and that human will understand you and vice versa, but that's rarely been my experience. Today I received a message on TV screen telling me to go to a particular web address, or call a number after following the steps given in an email instructing me how to get 48 hours of one of the FIOS premium channels for free. And it went like this:
Nothing on that web address said anything about how to get access to the "Free View" offered in the email, so I used the Chat to connect with a customer service rep and got
Shubhalakshmi briefly,
then Dan for an incredibly long time and who said he was creating a ticket to attach to my account and then disconnected chat before problem was resolved, (but no ticket was made)
then Gary on the phone who said he was sorry but couldn't fix it,
then Gary again who called back to say he did "fix it",
then getting email informing me that I'd agreed to a year of HBO at a cost of an add'l $187 in the coming year,
and then on phone with John who said he'd take care of it, but couldn't and would put everything back to what it was before I ever contacted Verizon customer support, and then finally his supervisor after very long wait who mumbled at beginning as if trying to make sure I couldn't hear his name.... who said I could disregard that email because he could see a note on his end that Gary made indicating the service he'd added would be manually deleted in 2 days, but the email was automatically generated by something Gary had done to override the system in an effort to make things right... (would have been nice if Gary had explained that to me so I wouldn't have gotten freaked out and then gone to all the trouble to make sure my automated payments didn't go up without my knowledge in what felt like some kind of deception on his part)...whew!!
And can you imagine all the steps involved & long pauses between each response, and the time on hold as each one said "let me check"? This was not inconvenient in just minutes. This was HOURS... and so aggravating!!
Please, give me a good reason not to jump ship. I don't want to go to all the trouble of setting up new providers, but I want to feel like I'm being treated fairly and getting what I pay for!
Is there some secret way to get Verizon's customer service reps to do things expeditiously, and not feel like a ball being bounced from one rep to the next, and repeated attempts to get the desired result???
I asked the last person, the supervisor who mumbled while giving his name for the name and contact information of someone high up on the food chain who I could contact. His response: "I can't tell you, but you can Google it."
