A couple of days ago I tried to add international roaming for a family member who was planning a short trip abroad to see relatives. It seemed to go through OK.
This morning I get an email from abroad to say there is no international plan on the phone.
So I call Verizon. The customer service rep is very nice. He can’t find any record of the order, but offers to re-set it. But every time he texts me a link to confirm his changing the service, I get a message saying there is an error.
After 32 minutes of this, he puts me on hold, comes back, says Verizon has changed the procedure and reps can no longer make these changes directly. Instead they have to walk the customer through it. So I go and repeat exactly what I did a couple of days ago.
I get to the final screen, hit “confirm”, and then I get this:
I would give them a point for honesty, except that I translate this to mean “never”.
(As I post this, I’m on hold again…47 minutes into the call and counting.)
Update: They sorted it after 55 minutes, 45 seconds…without me having to do it myself again….
Recently went through similar with Comcast. Not a single one of their self serve website services worked as designed. So many of them gave errors to the effect of “try again later”
But isn’t that weird??? Wouldn’t it be in their financial interests to have self-serve work and not have to take nearly an hour with live customer service to do a fairly simple and common thing?
I suppose you could argue they make so much money gouging people for international data, plus many people can’t hold on the phone for an hour while abroad without racking up even more fees. I am not sure even I am quite that cynical, but it’s a hypothesis….
No kidding. My experience was while switching over to Xfinity for Internet/mobile. I spent about 12 hours over the course of three weeks to switch over. I had to fight to get the original deal (black Friday) that I purchased. After all that, I almost get myself to return all the new equipment and cancel the service.
These companies have near monopolies. In some areas, one company’s product is sufficiently better to its few competitors that there is no real competitive option. Even if there is a viable alternative provider, the customer service experience is so universally bad (particularly in the cable and internet space) that the headache of switching in protest isn’t worth the effort. And so, there is no incentive to have good customer service. In fact, I often wonder whether these companies intentionally set up byzantine and ineffective customer service operations to discourage customers from engaging with them – it’s a “f!%k you, pay me” model. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3XGAmPRxV48