My Thoughts

How Verizon Destroyed A Customer Relationship With A Free Offer

Who doesn't like free stuff?  Maybe you received an email from Verizon FiOS offering three months of free HBO with no action required -- just tune to channel 400 or 899 and enjoy!  I thought that was really quite a good promotion and one that might entice a customer to subscribe at the end of the promotional period.

Unfortunately, the HBO promo only showed up on one of our TVs, so I decided to contact Verizon to see if we could get it on the TV we use as a family.  

This turned out to be a mistake.

I entered into five hours of live chat and telephone calls bouncing me around the company between tech support and billing as tech after tech basically had me do the same thing -- reboot the TiVo after they reset or reprogrammed the Cablecard in the DVR or the Optical Network Terminal outside the house. After the two hours of diagnostics, the techs successfully removed HBO from the box that was working and decided that a faulty Cablecard was why the other box wasn't getting HBO.  

A replacement Cablecard was sent and it arrived overnight.  Nice -- but shipped from 10 miles away, so not surprising.

The new card didn't fix the problem, so back to the phones.  I should note that to this point, everyone was quite friendly and wanted to see if there was anything else they could do for me before transferring me to someone else -- but at this point, I was getting weary of having techs trying the same things again and again.  It gave me the chance to note some interesting deficiencies in their system:

  • If you don't have Verizon phone service, it's very difficult for the agent to find your account.  The fallback is to look you up by address, which doesn't work well.  What does work well is to look up by customer number, which I have at hand, from years of experience dealing with Verizon, but for which I was never asked.
  • Agents don't appear to have access to case notes -- or maybe case notes aren't taken.  I had to explain the situation, the steps taken so far, and the desired outcomes each time -- and this was followed with a request to reboot the DVR after the agent again reset the Cablecard.  Frustrating.
  • Billing and tech support don't appear to have direct access to each other.  I had been transferred from tech support to billing and the billing agent said that my account was provisioned correctly for HBO.  Because I had been transferred from tech support to him, he decided to do a "warm handoff" back to tech support and explain the situation.  We held for thirty minutes as he waited for a tech support agent.  I would have expected some sort of internal priority queue.
  • I was disconnected at one point and I immediately got an email that suggested I could have solved the problem myself using Verizon In-Home Agent.  It seems that this application basically does what first level tech support does -- reset the Cablecard.

Even with the warm handoff, the final tech support agent wanted to reset the Cablecard and reboot the TiVo again.  She had no visibility as to what had been tried before.  After confirming for herself that the reset and reboot didn't fix the problem, she engaged a supervisor via some sort of instant messaging client.  The supervisor apparently verified that the serial numbers were correct and told the agent that the problem was not a Verizon problem.

I was then advised to contact TiVo for a firmware upgrade and the call abruptly ended.  Shortly followed by another, "Thanks For Contacting Verizon FiOS" email -- this time in Spanish.  Then overnight, I received a customer service survey that gave a scant 400 characters with limited punctuation to describe what was unresolved.  And an offer of a free movie that I won't be able to use since I don't have a Verizon DVR.

Lessons Learned:

  • Ultimately, I don't really care that much about $30 dollars worth of HBO and I shouldn't have wasted my time trying to get it.  My experiences with Verizon tech support are uniform enough that I should have known this was going to take a lot of my time.  
  • When I lost HBO on the TV where it was working, I stupidly allowed myself to get sucked in to reclaiming what I had "lost," and subsequently truly lost another three hours of my time.
  • I had forgotten how difficult it is to work through Verizon's support channels and this experience has lowered my Net Promoter Score from an 8 to a 2.  If FiOS Internet weren't such a stellar service, I'd be willing to give Time-Warner Cable a try.

Beyond the impact to me, Verizon needs to figure out their service system and make it much easier for customers to get support.  They also need to consider the unintended consequences of their micro-offers -- the idea is to surprise and delight the customers, not anger them.


© The Bollar Organization 2012