I just added a line to my Verizon wireless plan for my son last month and was very careful to be sure the phone I got for him did not require a data plan. I actually got this phone at one of the Verizon 3rd party “dealers”.
Imagine my surprise when I got my first bill a couple of weeks ago and they charged me for a data plan on that new phone. I was FURIOUS! I called their customer support and they told me that data plans were required on that phone as of November 2009 and there was nothing he could do about it. He suggested I go back to the 3rd party dealer and see if they could give me a different phone!!!! I WAS PISSED! This phone was a birthday gift for my son and he absolutely loves the phone. After I gave this customer service guy the “what for” and had to listen to his weak excuse that they require it because too many people get burned by data usage on their new phones, I marched down to the local 3rd party Verizon dealer. The guy I bought the phone from actually remembered me and remembered the “no data plan” requirement I requested. He was PISSED at Verizon at that point. Long story short, he told me the Verizon CS Rep lied to me about the Nov. 2009 date and showed me the Verizon memo that said the phone required a data plan if purchased after January 18th, 2010!!! He got his Verizon Rep involved and I will be credited the billed data plan and the data plan will be removed from this phone. That’s why I go through this 3rd party dealer, they have great Customer Service whereas the Verizon guy lied through his teeth to me.
Our landline here is ATT. (horrible service). Dropped them and went cable triple play - voice/Internet/TV.
Works great. Very rare internet outages.
Verizon wireless cellular has great coverage and network quality. Cust service is so so at best.
It’s because sales and service reps for telecoms switched from a per hour guaranteed wage to a leveraged wage. Then sales requirements were lumped in. Then on top of that they don’t monitor complaints over fraudulent sales activity because it causes reps to be too reluctant to lie.. oops I mean sell beyond the customers’ expectations.
They figure if they can lie just enough to sell you 5-10$ a month, you’ll accept it and they make their quotas. They then get to keep their job and perhaps make a few thousand more that year.
What’s really bad is how they outright steal and create orders whole cloth. I’ve seen cases where a customer had 5 or 6 orders for DSL because sales reps would hold the nae of a customer that ordered DSL before it was available. Then when it became available and realized that other reps had submitted the sale, they’d cancel the order and resubmit it. End result is the customer had conflicts in the ordering system which caused them to have problems right out of the gate. The reps who submitted it first lost their sales and the rep who got it last made a few bucks.
And management at the telecoms wonder why the field techs don’t want to become salesmen.