Training resources for international and Tier 2 support

[TRACINGS6]

Working in a support role for another company, I am obligated to share feedback on the extremely frustrating experience that I had with Verizon Support yesterday in hopes that changes can be made to improve the customer experience. 

My partner has been using a pre-arranged international TravelPass since last week, with 2 lines associated with their device. The first 5 days were successfully charged (for both lines) and could be used throughout different areas of Costa Rica. On Sunday, 3 days before the TravelPass was to expire, the cellular service dropped in the middle of a call and had not come back for either line in the country's capital city of San José by midday Monday upon calling support. 

After spending quite a bit of time working through the automated bot queue, I spent 3 hours over 2 calls- the first time working through Tier 1 and Tier 2 support and then Global Support terminated the call once they picked up the transfer and I had to start the process a second time... Following much of the same troubleshooting steps taken, and then talking me into purchasing a more expensive TravelPass Unlimited Ultimate package which also did not resolve the issue... the fifth tech that I spoke with said that it was likely due to a possible outage in Costa Rica and that I would receive a call with an update within 1-2 hours (going into the lunch hours). After waiting 3 hours with no update, I submitted service tickets through the My Verizon app for both of the lines that were experiencing issues and attempted contact through the "Live Agent Chat" which was not helpful at all. 

As it was nearing the end of the day and the user was out of the country without cellular service and posing a safety issue, I called back and spent another 2 hours working to get this resolved before the support line was to close for the day. 

Between the 3 calls totalling 5 hours of being on the phone and speaking with 7 different techs, Kevin was the only one that was able to resolve our issue by resetting the eSIM for both numbers on the device. I had suggested attempting this specific fix with the fifth tech after he wanted to chalk it up to a service outage, and he assured me that it was not the issue and told me that I would be contacted later, which I was not. It honestly felt like he was just frustrated with the issue and wanted to get me off the phone and move on instead of resolving the issue. The other techs were willing and trying to be helpful, but many requested the same information instead of reviewing the notes already established in my account, and repeated many identical troubleshooting tasks that yielded the same result. 

Through this experience, I strongly urge Verizon to invest more into a system to vet and escalate complex issues more efficiently without relying on the use of bots that do not fully comprehend real needs or can provide assistance past the standard, surface level support requests. It became apparent that the various techs were doing their best utilizing the resources that they had available to them, but these resources did not cover the deeper troubleshooting tasks needed after a certain point, and there didn't seem to be an established escalation path or follow up procedure in a timely manner. The international/global support team and/or Tier 2 (or Tier 3?) techs should be better equipped to recognize how to resolve these issues. 

Again, we deeply appreciated Kevin's attention to detail in reading the notes of what had already been attempted, as well as his determination in finding a resolution for us. 

I would be happy to provide more info on this experience to Verizon if desired.