Visual Voicemail "Something Went Wrong" Notification.

[frosteroste]

Visual Voicemail "Something Went Wrong" Notification.

I have been a Verizon customer for at least 23 years now. My Visual Voicemail has not been working on my Samsung phones for over 3 years now. I have called customer service/technical support more times than I can remember, often spending hours on the phone, and the only solution any of them has provided is to manually turn off my Wi-Fi every time I want to listen to a voicemail, or to dial *86 and enter my PIN, but I end up having to call customer service to reset my PIN every single time I try it that way.

There is no reason I should have to do any of this, and customer service/technical support should have resolved this issue years ago. Voicemail is literally one of the most basic features of any phone. Answering machines have existed for ~50 years. Ensuring that all of your customers have consistent access to your most basic features is literally the most important aspect of your business. 

If you search "visual voicemail something went wrong" in on this site, you'll get 46,403 search results. Here are the relevant results from the first 2 pages of search results (13 out of 20). You'll see there is a trend that the issue seems to occur primarily/only with Samsung devices. If you read through any of them, you'll see that Verizon has no idea how to fix the problem, and they are completely incompetent when comes to problem solving at the corporate level. They just keep going through the standard "troubleshooting playbook," and if it doesn't fix it, they "escalate" the problem, which doesn't do anything.

1. https://community.verizon.com/t5/Samsung/Visual-voicemail-not-working-on-samsung-galaxy-22/td-p/1700...
2. https://community.verizon.com/t5/Samsung/Why-Is-Visual-Voicemail-Not-Working-On-My-Samsung-6-Edge/td...
3. https://community.verizon.com/t5/Samsung/Basic-visual-voicemail-not-working/td-p/1760280
4. https://community.verizon.com/t5/Samsung/still-a-voicemail-problem-Android-Samsung-Galaxy/td-p/12128...
5. https://community.verizon.com/t5/Samsung/New-Galaxy-S10-NO-voicemail-Notifications/td-p/1744840
6. https://community.verizon.com/t5/Samsung/Samsung-Galaxy-z-Fold-4-Visual-Voicemail-and-Voicemail/td-p...
7. https://community.verizon.com/t5/Samsung/Voice-mail-error-code-9007-after-marshmallow-update/td-p/90...
8. https://community.verizon.com/t5/Samsung-Archives/Voicemail-does-not-update-unless-I-turn-off-the-wi...
9. https://community.verizon.com/t5/Other-Services-perks/A14-5G-visual-voicemail-not-working/td-p/17092...
10. https://community.verizon.com/t5/Samsung/No-Visual-Voicemail-on-Verizon-S21-Ultra/td-p/1207832
11. https://community.verizon.com/t5/Samsung/s23-ultra-visual-voicemail-not-working/td-p/1698383
12. https://community.verizon.com/t5/Samsung-Archives/Samsung-S21-5G-software-update-killed-Voicemail-ap...
13. https://community.verizon.com/t5/Samsung/Issues-with-Note-5-after-Marshmallow-Update-Wifi-Bluetooth-...

Verizon is completely incompetent. 

I have no faith in their ability to resolve this problem. Why should I continue to pay for phone service that doesn't work at the most basic level?

[vzw_customer_support]

frosteroste, this is not the experience we want you to have while accessing your voicemail. We're here for you and we want to ensure you are able to access the voicemail anytime you need to do so. Lets work on this together and find a solution. I will be sending you a private message. 

-Art

[frosteroste · Accepted solution]

It took several tech support people to respond to me. Most of them insisted I join them on chat so they could guess at the solution again, which I refused to do since I've already wasted so much time on the phone or in chat already.

One support person, Bryan, asked if I had a VPN. I didn't think I did, but I searched "VPN Settings," and it turned out that I did have a VPN set up. I turned the VPN off and now my Visual Voicemail works. Thank you Bryan!

I hope Verizon documents this solution and shares it with all of the others having the same problem, but I'm not holding my breath.