Thought I would share this letter. This gentleman is apparently in charge of the "Customer Experience" at Verizon. Doubt anyone will respnd to it, or anythign will become of it, but never the less, I sent it.
Mr. Pica,
I live in Bozeman, MT. An area where our only two choices are Alltell/AT&T and Verizon. While we have been quite happy with Alltell's level of service, as the time has drawn very near with AT&T, we grew scared of getting caught into a maelstorm and decided to switch to Verizon. This experience to say largely has been worse than anything we have ever experienced, both with the phones, and with he level of treatment we have received in the corporate owned store itself.
Rather than go into a tyrade of everything that has occurred, let me simply give you one tine piece of the story. The Samsung Fascinate. I arrived at the Samsung Fascinate after a faulty Droid 2 whose keyboard wouldn't actuate properly. (My fault according to your corporate store). Then by way of a Motorola Droid X who suffered very poorly at the hands of a 2.1 to 2.2 upgrade. The 4 days I spent on the phone with Motorola before finally giving up and returning this device and canceling the line it was under were the most hair pulling days I think I have had in years.
The Fascinate came to me by way of Amazon Wireless after I was told about it, and shown it in the Corporate store. The corporate employee stated to me, and I quote "This will be updated to 2.2 software in late November or the beginning of December.
Fantastic! I loved the screen size, the quality, so I ordered one from Amazon because I didn't want to be treated poorly in the store again. Needless to say, it was and hasn't been rosy. The first unit I got from Amazon was apparently one of 10,000 in a batch that were unable to update from DH12 to DI01 firmware (according to a Verizon tier 2 support person). In the process of finding this out, one of your tier 2 support people told me that my corporate store had the capability to push the update manually and they could solve it. After making a trip there, waiting for 45 minutes, a rather large fellow proceded to tell me and my wife that we could simply do this ourselves at the Verizon website. When I asked him exactly where it could be done, he didnt have an answer, and left us standing there for another 20 minutes while he looked at the phone.
When he returned, he was still insistent that I could solve my own problem by taking the phone home, hooking it to my computer and downloading the update myself. When I pressed him for an exact website address in which to do that, he of course could not give me one.
I returned home really angry and proceeded to get someone else from tier two support back on the phone. This person finally listened to the issue, did a little research and discovered that our store wasn't trained in nor did they have the capabilities to do a manual push to fix the problem, yet there isn't any natural way to do it over the web either as the gentleman in the store had insisted.
Needless to say, I got a replacement phone from Amazon within a couple of days that had the correct firmware. In the meantime, I purchased a Samsung Media dock. Now you can imagine my distaste when I discovered the media dock isn't fully functional because the telephone doesn't have up to date 2.2 software. I have to tell you that there is no better experience than throwing away the money you earn. In fact, I love doing it!
So here I am today, January 10th. I have a phone that still has problems with its GPS, I have an accessory that wont work because the phone doesn't have updated software, and after searching high and low, I find no communications from Verizon of when or how you or Samsung might fix this phone. I get instead a of variety if answers. The most obvious lies always come from the corporate store. Go Figure. I guess people will say anythign when they are paid on commission.
AT&T wont be making their full switchover here until the end of February which means I still have a working contract with them I am paying on while I have service with you. At this point, since what I have experienced seems to be the best user experience Verizon can give me, I wont have any problem paying my ETF's, and taking my chances with AT&T. At least they seem to ACT like they want my business.
Being treated rudely and with disrespect by your corporate store (and then filing a complaint about it that went unanswered), dealing with devices that didn't work, or failed upgrades, etc etc just seems to be a little too much. I would certainly hope that if you are the person in charge of the customer experience as your title denotes, that you will learn that the customer experience embodies so much more than just the cool features of the next phone, or how much speed your network is capable of.
Regards,
Ellen E.& Joe{edited for privacy}
