DMarcelo
Premium
join:2004-11-27
Bethesda, MD
| Open Letter to Verizon from an Invisible Customer
Dear Verizon;
Today I had the pleasure of refereeing a finger pointing session between my DSL service provider (Verizon DSL) and my VOIP service provider (Verizon VoiceWing). They blamed each other for my degraded service for the past two weeks.
It is beyond me, why I am still your customer (at least for the next 12 hours), but rest assured it is not because of your superior customer service. If part of your corporate strategy is to reduce calls to your service folks, it’s probably working well, but I bet you’re not saving much. You have succeeded, however, in making the customer experience with your organization extremely painful.
One of the reasons that I’m still a Verizon customer is probably because I don’t expect much more from your industry competitors. In this age of Customer Relationship Management (CRM), I don’t understand why your billing or back-office system can be quite capable of identifying me as a single person (or bank account) and correctly calculating my service usage to the second, yet when it comes to servicing, I suddenly become either invisible or turn into some multi-complex entity by your front-office applications.
Today, I’m probably still a Verizon customer because even disconnecting my service is complex. I am guessing that it is going to take more than a few calls to figure out who to call to disconnect what. For example, although I was originally assured that I could keep my legacy phone number, during the porting process I was assigned a different phone number for my DSL service than my VOIP number.
Why do I have to spend almost an hour (15 minutes call waiting, 40 minutes off and on hold) explaining the very same services you are providing to me. I don’t really care who’s doing the provisioning. I shouldn’t know anything about your 3rd parties. Please do not start pointing fingers at your own organization or give me another number to call, and wait, and explain again.
Please train your staff so that they don’t have to be educated by your customers on your branded products and services. Your customers should not hear “Yes, I’ve heard of VoiceWing, how can I help you?” You can only imagine my frustration when I had to explain why I was no longer using the house phone jacks or why I didn’t have filters on my phone lines. All I wanted to know is why I’m paying for a 700+ speed line but only getting 100 kbps.
And please explain the 20 question security strategy that requires me to still provide you with an obscure account number. Now, not only am I saddled with keeping track of two Account numbers and two phone numbers, but I am forced to banter with your voice response system that does not understand who I am or why I am calling.
I can only offer empathy and apology to with your human customer service staff that have to live with the resources they are provided with. I have no beef with them. To a person, they have been cordial and professional throughout. Although they should really take the time and the initiative to browse through their customer-facing websites once in a while, your customer service folks desire to help is the only reason I did not leave Verizon weeks ago.
I can only surmise that Verizon management is unwilling or unable to implement the appropriate system or tools which surely have been available for ages to address my visibility as a customer. Please review Forrester Research or your favorite CRM or Customer Data Integration (CDI) pontificator on the best solution for your industry. Application systems have really come a long way toward offering a “360-degree” view of your customer. Please take advantage of them.
Regards;
Your Invisible Customer |
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jjoshua
Premium
join:2001-06-01
Scotch Plains, NJ | Re: Open Letter to Verizon from an Invisible Custo
One of the great things about VOIP is that you can get away from Verizon. |
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TearAbite
join:2001-07-25
Rancho Cucamonga, CA
 ·surpasshosting
 ·Charter Pipeline
| reply to DMarcelo
Re: Open Letter to Verizon from an Invisible Customer
for me, Charter+Vonage = NO MORE VERIZON !!
I cant tell you the satisfaction i had after CLOSING my POTS account and getting the letters from Verizon BEGGING me to come back, and trying to explain how important i was to them. Phhfftt yeah right!
.
--
Click HERE to see my FAKEz |
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RockyBB
Premium
join:2005-01-31
Longmont, CO
| reply to DMarcelo
Re: Open Letter to Verizon from an Invisible Custo
one of my great delights is helping a customer get internet service from someone other than the Bell company (cable or a wireless ISP), and then helping them get a VOIP provider. then they can be
--QwestFree
--VerizonFree
--SBCFree
--BellSouthFree
This strategy eliminate the "policies" and the taxes and the surcharges and the customer punishment departments.
You've been around long enough...you know that Verizon (and every other Bell company) customer service is exasperating. When are you going stop bellyaching and pull the trigger to become VerizonFree? |
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stevech1
join:2005-01-08
1 edit | reply to DMarcelo
ILECS and Cable TV/Modem providers
Without Competition There Is No Excellence
The regulated-era corporate culture cannot be changed except by the passage of time. |
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DMarcelo
Premium
join:2004-11-27
Bethesda, MD
| reply to RockyBB
said by RockyBB  :... When are you going stop bellyaching and pull the trigger to become VerizonFree? No worries. It's a done deal. Trigger pulled. |
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Niarlan
Excelsior
Premium
join:2002-11-09
Manville, NJ | Excellently written letter though, I'd love to see if you get a response back from it and what they would have to say.
Nia |
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VoiceWingRep
Premium
join:2005-07-28
| reply to DMarcelo
Re: Open Letter to Verizon from an Invisible Customer
I understand your frustration with us and with this whole situation. This is not the type of service we want to provide our customers. I apologize for everything you've been through and thank you for your the patience you've shown so far.
The only thing I can offer in terms of an explanation, and this is not intended as an excuse, is the complexity of the processes involved. You've had taste of this, to be sure. It is an issue the company is striving to address as a whole, but given the enormous size and number of systems and processes, it is not an issue that can be solved overnight. Again, I'm sorry our efforts to date did not serve you well.
I can offer two things, however. One, send me an email via BBR if your problems still haven't been resolved. I'll see if there's anyone else I can engage to resolve whatever is outstanding. Secondly, your situation has gained the attention within multiple departments within Verizon, and it really underscored that we need to improve our coordination between all departments involved. We are already taking steps toward this end. |
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nrf
join:2003-02-20
Morrow, OH | reply to DMarcelo
Re: Open Letter to Verizon from an Invisible Custo
Amazing to have two parts of the same company point fingers at each other. I for one am proud to be...
Sprint Free!
good luck!
nrf |
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NGOwner
join:2000-11-21
Leawood, KS | reply to DMarcelo
Re: Open Letter to Verizon from an Invisible Customer
SBC Free since 8/05.
Time Warner & Lingo.
[NG]Owner |
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jay_rm
join:2002-04-12
Netville
 ·Fox Valley Internet
 ·ViaTalk
| reply to DMarcelo
Re: Open Letter to Verizon from an Invisible Custo
It was a happy day, some 18 months ago, when the SBC truck parked on the rural road across from my house and DISCONNECTED my phone drop from the cable bundle.
I love the smell of disconnection in the morning....
Add a local wireless ISP as my Internet provider and I was ex-Bell free !
Well, my wife's credit card is from AT&T, but at least it's no fee - and my cell provider is Cingular. Guess you can't break all the chains 
--
3500/512 5.7 GHz Motorola Canopy Wireless; FoxValley.net: 2 lines Vonage VoIP |
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Simmer911
Premium
join:2005-01-12
Chelsea, AL
| reply to DMarcelo
This applies to all companies and all customer service departments. You cannot get anything done these days without being on hold forever or going through useless menus. It seriously is ridiculous. You would think these companies would rather you just give up instead of getting help as complicated as they make it and as stupid of service REPS they hire. |
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jjoshua
Premium
join:2001-06-01
Scotch Plains, NJ
 ·Verizon FIOS
·Comcast
| reply to jay_rm
said by jay_rm :Well, my wife's credit card is from AT&T, but at least it's no fee Don't worry - that's AT&T in name only. It's totally owned by Citigroup. |
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DMarcelo
Premium
join:2004-11-27
Bethesda, MD
| reply to VoiceWingRep
Re: Open Letter to Verizon from an Invisible Customer
said by VoiceWingRep :I understand your frustration with us and with this whole situation. This is not the type of service we want to provide our customers. I apologize for everything you've been through and thank you for your the patience you've shown so far... Thanks for taking the time and braving the slings and arrows to respond. I’m sure it is not easy to swallow the barrage of condemnations in most of these postings.
As a consumer it’s not my general nature to throw in the towel at the first sign of issues with merchants. I’m more prone to “bellyache” until somebody fixes the problem. That is, unless I get the feeling that nobody’s listening and/or it’s costing me monies in the process.
With Verizon/VoiceWing, it seemed that folks WERE listening, but they just didn’t or couldn’t formulate an action plan to correct the problems. I was paying my fees, but not getting the promised services.
A quick look at my phone log, and it seems pretty obvious that anyone with as many 0 minute duration calls must be experiencing a problem. On a typical day my call log indicated an average of about 40+ inbound calls and 15+ outbound calls with 0 minute duration. That’s because of a 99% call abandonment due to the voice quality.
Compounded with this lack of service I also had to endure an unusual $70.00 cell phone bill that is the direct result of my VOIP issues.
The net result is that besides the headaches, I was just not realizing the VOIP savings from Verizon/Voicewing.
Again, I do appreciate your response and the genuine empathy displayed by your customer service personnel. Hopefully, the technology, service, and training issues will be corrected soon and your customers’ experience with this convergence experiment is more positive. |
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Status8
join:2005-10-21
Kent, WA
| Calling Customer Service is like getting a jellybelly from the mixed bin. There are some great flavors that will put a smile on your face but there others that will leave you with a bitter taste. That's how it goes with all product support. Best thing you can do is request the flavor your looking for, but first make sure your not in the hardware department.
Every company has great agents and those who need "improvement". Only thing is, when everything works, no one complains. I am the first to agree that getting the "I'm sorry, we don't do that here." or "The Hard...ware... Department? Do we have one of those" responses are frustrating to no end. Let this be a good indication that you need to talk to someone else. Request a supervisor, tier 2 support, even request to speak with a senior Rep or leader. (don't go to high up the chain stay on the production side not operational management) Also, whoever you end up with, let them know who you talked to prior and let them know that person was unaware / unable to provide the assistance that was asked of them. I promise you, no matter which company it is, that agent will get the information they didn't know and next time you call.. who knows, maybe they'll be informed to answer your questions.
Thank you for the post. It speaks for a lot of us to a lot of these developing company's / products. |
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