As you may or may not know, I've had my problems with AT&T's internet service back in Indiana. Renewing my service for the first time, I had to talk to three people, each of whom required some holding time to get to, took the last 4 digits of my SSN, and tried to sell me the same upgrades. Later on, I found they offered faster service for cheaper than they were charging me, which was weird, and though they agreed to switch me to that, they ended up not doing so for several billing cycles and until I called them twice about it.
So this is why I'm surprised that Verizon has made AT&T look good.
First, nobody offers service at AT&T's price here, even at half the speed we had in Indiana. So we signed up for slow service from Verizon. But then the strike hit, and they had to cancel our installation. That's understandable, but we needed internet, so we signed up for Comcast. I tried calling to cancel several times: several times an automated system hung up on me because they could only deal with certain kinds of issues; then finally when I got a person, she had to transfer me to someone else, so I was disconnected again and gave up.
Then, about a week ago, I started getting about 4 calls a day saying that our installation appointment was coming up. This is more than a month after our ideal installation date, so I tried calling again. I had the exact same conversation with the machine ("Her") three times before giving up:
Her: What is the person's last name?
Me: Chenette.
Her: Okay, let's try this. You can say the person's last name, and then spell the first 3 letters.
Me: Chenette. C-H-E.
Her: What's the person's first name? You can say, "I don't know."
Me: Timothy.
Her: I only have one record of that name in Amherst, Massachusetts: [undecipherable, clearly not my name]. Is that the person you're calling about?
Me: No.
Her: You're calling about service in Amherst, Massachusetts, right?
Me: Yes.
Her: What is the person's last name?
Finally, I replied to an email that was supposed to let me "reschedule," requesting that they cancel the service. A few days ago I got a very apologetic call from a representative, saying she'd put a note on my record.
Then, today, I got an email with the subject "Verizon High Speed Internet Service Not Available":
3 comments:
I had a *terrible* experience with Verizon when we first made the switch. They charged me twice for the same phone calls, and it took three years, several letters from several collections agencies, etc., before they finally dropped it. It's sad that you have to go through so much time and trouble just to take care of something simple. Hope you guys are all set on the internet now! :-)
I'd say Verizon needs a total make -over. We had similar experiences here in Pok. Good thing you decided to go with comcast after all...
When living in LA, I had a similar inexcusable experience when trying to schedule an appointment with a technician. They offered me a time slot on a weekday from 4 to 7PM when we needed someone home. Both my roommate and I worked until 5 or 6PM, and we would have waited for a Saturday appointment, but the next available one was more than 3 weeks away. We were not going to delay internet for nearly a month, so she generously took the afternoon off to make the appointment. The technician never showed up.
There is no way to contact the scheduling/technician dispatcher directly, so each and every time I called to (1) ask where the technician was, (2) express my disappointment that the technician didn't show up, (3) reschedule the appointment, I had to go through that ridiculously long drawn out automated voice questioning!
I think to this date, those have been most disgruntled conversations I've ever had (and my old roommate can attest to that)!
Now I'm happy with the little regional company here that started my internet a month before their semester-system started and didn't charge me for it. This semester, they actually dropped the rate by $10 and increased the speed!
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