October 8, 2004

More Verizon DSL Frustrations

10 days ago Verizon told me my DSL was scheduled to be turned on today. Today they told me it would be 10 days from now. They claim there is a problem with the line or alternately that the line isn't provisioned. What is especially annoying is that DSL was working before and there was no problem on the line. The only thing that happened is that the main office tried to do something called a move order to move the service from one jack to the other jack (move orders are normally done when someone moves from one house to another house) and then cancelled the move order when it didn't work, but the DSL people never heard about cancellation and so it's still listed as a move order on the DSL side. My guess is that because it's still the same number and the same address the computer is confused and keeps delaying the order (who would move to the same address). This is exactly what happened with our voicemail (which only got fixed when we managed to get someone who actually cared about our dilemma on the line). But the DSL tech people are not trained to deal with these kind of situations so they just hand me off to something called the move department and the move department (seemingly staffed by people who don't know how to deal with anything out of the ordinary) hands me back to the tech people. The absolute unwillingness of people in those departments to do anything to get you out of this morass or even to clearly explain the problem is maddening.

I'm going to let it go ten days more then I cancel the order and go with another company. This is a perfect example of how companies lose customer good will. I, the customer, am stuck in a situation where nobody seems to know exactly what problem is, in which there is no escalation path so that a supervisor can actually get into the account to understand the big picture, and where the problem seems to get worse with every attempt to fix it. I'm starting to associate Verizon with incompetence and will definitely switch companies if I can. All this is in marked contrast to SBC the monolithic phone company on the other coast. When there was a problem over there I was always able to go up the chain until I got to someone who actually understood the problem and could solve it or at least give me an accurate timetable. In addition to losing me as a customer they are also losing hours and hours of time for all the calls back and forth while people dither.

AAARRRGGGG.

posted at 09:22 AM by raul

Filed under: rants