Terrible Service - The worst Customer Experience I've ever had from a Cell Phone Provider

[Subsonic]

I first sent this as a private message to the vzw_customer_support and have had "Zero" responses so here it is in the forum. I need to get this sorted out please and quickly - There are a ton of failings here.

Good Morning

I didn't want to put this is the general escalations chat forum so thought best to communicate with you this way. I want to make you aware of the terrible customer service that I have been receiving as a new customer to Verizon Wireless though an existing customer with Verizon Fios for the past 7 years.

I reach out to your sales team in response to a flyer that came in the mail offering me $10 a month of my wireless bill and $30 a month off my Cable bill if I signed up for a wireless account (Back in November of last year). 

I signed a deal with you via your direct sales person Simon (Cell: Number in my private message) He will also be able to help you with understanding my issues. He was a great sales person and has tried to help me with the service support folks a number of times but his hands are clearly tied when it comes to after sales service support.

The Deal that I signed up for was for 5 Lines with 4 new phones trading in 4 old Phones. The 4 new phones were 1 x Samsung Galaxy S21 Ultra, 2 x Galaxy S21 5G and 1 x Phone 13 256gb. In addition to this we took 1 additional New Line which I had a phone for and I purchased a Samsung Watch.

Against the 4 new phones we traded in 3 x Samsung S9+ handsets and 1 x iphone 8 Plus.  Is this deal I was assured that as long as the devices did not have leaking batteries (You can listen to the sales call) we would be receiving $800 trade in value for our S9+ handsets and $400 for our iPhone 8 Plus. In addition to this I would be receiving a credit for $500 for taking on the new line and bringing my own device.

So we did the deal and that is where the fun started. We were going on vacation for Christmas to Florida and your iPhones were showing out of stock but in within a few days.  The iPhone was part of a Christmas gift for my daughter. With this in mind our Sales person setup to arrange the iPhone to go to the Apartment complex that we were staying in and the other handsets to come to us at home. Your shipping team sent all of our handsets except the Ultra to Florida - the Ultra turned up at my house. This was an annoyance and risky as that is a ton of money worth of hand sets to be left in an office a week ahead of us but it worked out so there was little lost here.

When we got the devices all setup on Christmas day all was working well, then I got my first bill. None of the discounts were setup so I called a number of times on hold for over an hour each time to get this worked out. I also hadn't received any information on the $500 credit or how to trade in the handsets. We were well into January by this stage. I also started receiving notifications that I wasn't paying my bill but I could see money leaving the agreed account to pay the bills. I called in again to customer service and they assured me that everything was ok and to ignore the messages (All this again is recorded - check inbound calls from my personal cell Number in my private message).

Within a day of my last call I received a call from my wife that she had received a text from one of my daughters friends that my daughters phone had been cut and that she had received a message from Verizon saying that they cut it off because I hadn't paid the bill. Besides the embarrassment that comes with this at high school for a 16yr girl we immediately lost emergency contact availability with our daughter which is the ONLY reason for us that she has a cell phone. I was fairly frustrated by this outcome and called our Sales person back again. He looked into the account and said it looked like there was a service issue and my daughters iphone account was being run separate from our other handsets and the accounts needed to be merged to fix it. He put me through to customer service again. The first person I got on the phone told me he couldn't do anything until I paid the bill so he transferred me to a lady to help me do that, The lady then looked into the account and said that she couldn't help me because on this account there was no Pin number setup so she had to transfer me back to customer service. I than sat on hold again for your customer service. This next customer service person apologized for the inconvenience. I explained my frustration with the issues I was facing and he offered to take them, deal with them during that day, assuring me that he would get my daughters line back up and running by the end of the day and I didn't have to sit on the phone any longer - This ownership I appreciated.

Unfortunately the line never came into service that day so I had to go through the whole process again the next day (call the sales person and get transferred to service - Without this your service queues are over an hour. It's about time that you stop making statements that you are busy due to unusual call volume and admit that you don't have enough people manning your phones! By this time I'm guess I'd spent in excess of 12 hours on hold and calls with your teams. That is not customer service). When I got through to customer service a Gentleman by the Name of Saint Jonathan answered the call. As a person that runs large Operational Organizations for some of the largest Banking and Mortgages businesses in the USA let me tell you please, Saint Jonathan was by far the best customer service agent that I have work with in your organization to date, he should be promoted and given a team to train. I started by asking to speak with a supervisor (who surprise, was busy) though he assured me after reading through my notes that he was going to fix everything and no customer should be going through what I am to get service that I am paying for. He had my daughter phone back up and running in about 40mins and then went to work trying to help me resolve other issues including applying promotional discounts. On still not having information on what to do with the trade in phones and my $500 credit, he gave me a link to claim the $500 credit and then attempted to help me get the phone trade ins sorted out.  The link to the $500 credit told me that my window to claim it had closed so I had to email customer service to submit a help request for that. He also took me through the trade in process website however, only 1 phone was coming up meeting the $800 trade in (the first one - there is nothing unique about the phone just a 64gb S9+) and any others I tried were giving us very different and minimal values so he told me to take them to our local store and trade them there. He assured me that everything now was resolved and that our service should be all sorted out. There should be credits applied to our daughters account and she was now merged, he was applying historic credits from our activation date in Mid December etc etc.

My Wife attempted to take the trade in handsets to the store in Downingtown, PA (A Verizon owned store) and was served by a gentleman named Brian. He refused to take 2 of the phones because they did not have the IMEI numbers on a sticker on the back. My wife called me and I suggested that he enter *#06# on the phone keypads which he refused to do because he didn't know what that was (your sales folks asked us to do that to get the IMEIs when we signed up to check network compatibility!). My wife then asked him to speak to me on the phone and he refused actually saying "I refuse to speak to you husband" - this was terrible customer service. My wife left your store very upset. I returned to the store myself the next day and Brian was not there however, I worked with another staff member who was a little obnoxious, clearly thought very highly of himself though worked with me to get the trade in phones in the system. They also came up with very random values however, he dialed me into customer service escalations who assured me not to worry the deal would all be honored that we signed up for. 

The status as of now. I have now received an email from your customer service team telling me that they will not be giving us the credit for the $500 because we were out of time to apply for it (The time limit was never shared nor was a link to access it until the day I tried with Customer Service), all of the phones were sent in over a month ago (Here are the order numbers for the store 3 X, X, X and Tracking number number for the 1 done through the website X) , I've had no confirmations that they have been processed and I am continuing to be hit with HUGE bills of over $300 (one over $500) a month when my total is supposed to be $170!  I have spent insane numbers of hours on the phone with your long wait times and poor customer service and here is difference with your competitors. I called T-Mobile this morning, was offered a call back and my wait was 5 mins! The customer service person was knowledgeable and my problem was resoled in 10mins. 

I need someone to dig into my account, do a full review from day please. Apply my phone credits, sort out my $500 line credit, make sure that all of my credits from Day 1 are resolved and at this point offer me some sort of compensation for the horrendous service that I have had to endure. I have to be honest with you, I only left T-mobile because to offered me a great cost saving option but at this point with the amount of hours I have had to put in pleading for someone to help me and take ownership of getting my service over the line, the Juice really isn't worth the squeeze and I am seriously considering taking myself back to T-Mobile for the far superior customer service. Seriously, you should try the difference yourself between your and your competitors service agents. 

Please dig into my notes, feel free to listen to all of my calls and help me to get this cleaned up.

[Edited to remove personal information]

[Subsonic]

Come on folks? No reply at all to my request.  have exhausted just about every customer service option @vzw_customer_support 

[KH-OrnEsh]

While a Verizon employee may occasionally post here, this community is meant mainly for peer-to-peer support. If you need to talk to a Verizon representative, you should contact customer service directly.  

[Subsonic]

Thank you for the heads up, I didn't know that! 

I'll reach out to them on Instagram.