After searching long and hard, it appears that there is no place to lodge a formal complaint against Verizon. I saw where an individual was told by a Verizon rep the place to file such complaints is right here in the forums. This seems to be an ineffective place to make such statements. With that said, I write this post with little expectation of satisfaction in remedying the complaint. In fact, I believe that the lack of a formal complaint channel points to the company's unwillingness to address key business points, such as customer satisfaction. Consider this post an indication of one such dissatisfied customer.
As background, I have been a steady Verizon customer for about 12 years (give or take a year). In that time, I have re-signed my contract several times, purchased numerous phones, and have been timely in my payments. I seem to recall even being given a Verizon VIP status which gave me a discount on phone accessories. The fact that most people reading this will have never heard of the Verizon VIP status points to how long I've been with Verizon. My first Verizon phone was the Motorola V60i - top of the line at the time.
Recently the credit card I have on file for auto payment expired. I knew it was going to expire and updated the account with a new card as soon as it came in. Apparently this update did not stick. About two weeks ago, my wife began getting phone calls from Verizon. Each time they called it would be from a different out of region phone number. Each time an automated voice would leave a message about "changes to the account". The calls increased to about 5 per day with several text messages throughout. The first red flag is that her line is a secondary number, whereas mine is the primary. If there was a legitimate change to the account the assumption is that Verizon would call the primary account holder. They did not.
This continued for about a week. The calls and the texts would come during working hours and into the night. I called one of the numbers back. After pressing # to do this and # to do that, I was given a choice. Press 1 to make a payment to the account or press 2 if you have already paid this bill or are planning to pay this bill immediately. Since I had already paid the bill, I pressed 2. The next automated message I received said that they would be expecting my payment within 7 days and the system would be updated to reflect I had made this agreement. Failure to pay the bill would cause an interruption in my service.
My problems-
1. Verizon should not call a secondary number to discuss the bill. Luckily the secondary number was my wife's. What if it had been a teenaged child?
2. Verizon should not engage in such harassing techniques. I have been a loyal customer for over a decade. A simple phone call from a human and I would have happily explained I did update the card, and then paid immediately. It went too far for no reason.
3. As a customer, I should have quick access to a customer rep or another avenue, such as a dissatisfaction form in My Verizon, to outline this in a more conducive manner than simply throwing it into a pile of other forum posts with no sense of direction or expectation of satisfaction.
It is for all these reasons that I am dissatisfied with Verizon currently. I am not currently under contract and I am shopping for another provider. While I'm sure many of my complaints will be found in the other provider, at least I have the satisfaction of taking my dollars to a company that will treat me like a number on a page instead of the misconception that customer loyalty still meant anything. Again, I am not expecting any followup from Verizon, but you have my phone number if you would like to discuss this. After all, a simple call from a human in the first place would have corrected this.
My question to the rest of the forum is, "Am I the only one in this boat?"
