Everyone Knows How To Handle A Stolen Checkbook Except For Verizon
Yesterday I was musing that Time Warner Cable was passing the cost of customer care off to other businesses, by requiring customers to take half-days or full days off of work just to wait for a cable repairman. Today I think I stumbled upon another hidden economic impact of bad customer service: it's responsible for generating a lot of the "free" content online. The next time you're reading an IMDB entry about "Damages" or "Big Love" for example, you can thank Verizon's collection of angry, confused, and possibly insane employees, and all the idle time they create for a customer who has to deal with them.
Hariette's story is long, but you'll alternately laugh and cringe as she shares what happened to her after her checkbook was stolen this past December. Hariette worked with her bank to quickly patch up any security holes from the theft, and soon she was set up with a new account.
Changing her billing info with Verizon was not so easy, however. Apparently Verizon's "e-center" has never been seen by any humans working at Verizon, but it's where you have to go to get anything done. Here's probably the most telling exchange Hariette has with any Verizon employee in the whole story:
“As the 20th minute approached, the rep fearfully told me, "Ms. Surovell, I am only allowed to spend 20 minutes helping each customer. From this point on, you will have to hold for the e-center yourself."
"So, what was the point of your being involved at all, if you can't do anything for me?" I asked.
"Ma'am, I'd like to help you, I would, but I'll get in trouble if I don't get off the line now."
He was becoming frantic.
I stayed on the line, holding for the e-center until I got the announcement. It was 6 p.m., and the e-center was officially closed. I was welcome to phone back the next day between 8 a.m. and 6 p.m.
”
There you have it: a Verizon employee admitting that he has to not help solve your problem or his job will be at stake.
Our favorite person at Verizon now is officialy "T," the relocated Texan who is some sort of security agent for Verizon, and who used to work in Tampa, and who won't stop calling Harriette a "ticket" whenever she amuses him. Oh, also he keeps calling her from his Verizon cell phone, which goes in and out of range, and he suffers from road rage.
“"Well, I gotta be honest here, Ma'am, and tell you that it's not looking good. Now, let me warn you, we're going into a zone, and my cell may go out, so..."
"I didn't hear the last thing you said. You're fading out."
"What? What did you say?"
"I said I can't hear you! I'm hanging up."
"What was that, Ma'am?"
A few minutes later, he called back.
"'T', I can't stay on the phone with you like this every day. These calls are taking a lot of time, and I need to use my time to be writing my articles. "
"Ma'am, you are a ticket! Hey, can you hold on there a minute, some people should not be allowed on the road (screaming out the window...) 'Lady, you fucking idiot, you goddamned moron, who the fuck taught you how to drive?!' (Without skipping a beat...) Pardon my language there, Ma'am, I hope I didn't offend you, but some people driving out there can really rile you up."
"I'm a New Yorker, it takes more than the f-word to shock me." I lied. "T's" segues from extreme formality (I was being "Ma'am'ed" more than Judge Judy) into gross obscenity unnerved me.
"Well you are a ticket, I tell you, that's what you are!"
”
Sure, that part of the story sounds like it's ready to be optioned for a movie, but there's no happy ending when Verizon is involved. In fact, if customer service is a priority for you, remember this response from Verizon when Hariette asked them to at least apologize for wasting her time for six months on what was supposed to be a simple account edit: "No, we will not."
Verizon Customer Diss-Service" [Matahariette]
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Comments:
Not to blame the victim, but I really have a hard time believing that all this customer did was politely ask to change her checking account information on her auto pay and this happens - "I can't help you with that!" the business office rep yelled, angrily, and abruptly hung up". I mean c'mon, really?! Even for a cell phone company, there just has to be something missing or the writer is seriously exaggerating/outright fibbing.
@blueneon:
You've obviously never worked in a customer call center. This sounds like a bad case of employees snowed under with calls from customers they know they can't do anything for. Some get angry, some become overly nice. All of this shows bad management, bad training and probably a shoddy business plan. "Not to blame the victim"
@crowbaby: Is it that obvious? I've been working in a call center for 5 years now .. for a cell phone company. I'm very familiar with calls that I know I cannot help with, unfortunately, but I have NEVER heard someone, upon hearing the customers issue, immediately yell and then hang up on them. Customer abuse, anyone?
@blueneon: Based on experience, I would guess that what is missing is the customer talking about how much Verizon sucks for 10 minutes, while the rep keeps trying to interrupt and explain that the customer has the wrong department. Then possibly the customer saying, "Well you should help me anyway", followed by the rep finally telling her in frustration that they cannot help.
@Muhammed T Prophet: I use cheques, and i have no intention of changing that any time soon, because I retain control of who gets paid and when.
@Muhammed T Prophet: Who uses checks? How about people that have to pay rent. Or a utility bill to a small local utility that has no website. Or the local landfill that only accepts cash or checks.
Yup, checks are worthless.
@Muhammed T Prophet:
I agree with you that allowing Verizon to auto-debit your account is almost guaranteed to cause problems.
But I really get sick of the smugness that goes on here. What do you care if someone uses checks? Does it make you feel superior that you don't?
@chris_d: I have an aversion to cheques because of how slow, insecure, and antiquated they are. I've got a Continental Finance Mastercard with low fees and good rewards that I use for most everything.
Nonetheless, to each his own.
@Muhammed T Prophet: Who uses checks? How about college students whose university's various departments only accept 3 forms of payment: cash, check, or HuskyBucks, which have to be put on one's HuskyCard via a cash deposit. Given the choice between carrying $324 in cash to pay (for example) for my garage pass and carrying my checkbook to pay for my garage pass, I choose the latter.
@Muhammed T Prophet: You didn't read the entire article. It wasn't just checks, I was floored reading this.
@Muhammed T Prophet: Wow, victim-blaming, denying victim-blaming, and "Who does x???" in one post, and it was first. That's gotta be some kind of Consumerist bingo.
This is one reason I don't use autopay. Just one more thing for a company to screw up.
@HenryES: perhaps but for those of us who cannot keep things straight in our minds, autopay is nice (and for my loans I get a discount for automated ACH)
Look, I hate the e-center as much as the next person. I do not know why they suck so much, but unfortunately if you get someone in another department (like the FSC, where I work), they can do absolutely nothing for you, it's like calling a different company. So making that person from the other department wait with you while you call the e-center, well it doesn't help your problem any.
What I'm saying is, while I understand that having the employee say "I can't stay on this call any longer, I'll get in trouble." seems bad... that employee never could have helped you in the first place, you were just emotionally blackmailing them to stay on the line.
That said: by Thor, I really, really hate the e-center. I do not know why they suck so very much.
"customers to take half-days or full days off of work just to wait for a cable repairman" I have never understood why utilities get away with this kind of scheduling and expecting people to take time off!.
@Laura Northrup: I've never had plumbers or other repairmen who have given me six hour windows of time.
@SatanicGuinea:
Comcast tried that with me, but I know from experience that the installer always calls when he's on his way. So I accepted their time window and went to work anyway. When the tech called to say he was on his way, I told him I'd be home in 10 minutes.
While reading about the Texan, was anyone else reminded of Melvin Palmer from Boston Legal?
Can I put 2 cents in here about this. My former employer was in the business of selling cell-phones for the big three: Sprint, Verizon, AT&T(cingular at the time). On a scale of 1-10, I give the folks at Verizon an 8. 7 for the AT&T folks, they were nice but not always as cheerful, and the folks at Sprint a -24856. That's not an error either. When I call and give you me retailer ID number, please refrain from treating me as a hostile witness in a triple homicide. I am holding the paperwork from YOUR company with YOUR HEADER on it and reading you the account number. Don't tell me it doesn't exist. Work through your crappy dual billing system and FIND THEM. I cannot count on both hands the number of times in a week that customers phones would be shut off before they left the building because Sprint said they never paid their deposit, when I took the money myself, verified on their account, AND activated their new phone. And EVERY TIME they made it the fault of the customer and us the THEY put the money into and account that didn't exist in one of their two magical billing systems. Sprint, there is a reason you're losing customers like mad: If you piss off the people who are selling your product and your competitors products, who do you think we are gonna push more?
@jayphat:
I used to work for sprint a sprint affiliate. The problem i saw most was the billing system migraton that had no rhyme/reason; accounts that were being "moved" didn't exist for weeks at time. We had a direct line to a legacy call center that was up on on the problems and we could usually take care of issues with one call. Sounds like you your dealer/owner/acct rep didn't care a whole lot. Sprint ended up purging most of the dealers in our market for fraud.
All things considered you can look at these last years as how to NOT CONDUCT BUSINESS. Hell, you can apply to your own investments. Don't buy assents you cannot easily incorporate. If you need to shift "account properties" (like a billing system) give warning and do it all at once. LOL, "market by market" left one zip code in the old system and the next one in the new.
I still have a sprint phone with some sweet socs. If i had to choose a carrier i'd go VZ first, Sprint, then ATT last looking for any option in between. Customer service is important but i can't carry a call down a interstate or suburban road i might as well stop and find a pay phone...
I use checks to pay for every bill I have. I don't pay any bills over the Internet or the phone, and I absolutely do not allow auto-pay from any account for any reason. I decide who gets paid, when they get paid and how much, every single time, without fail. My money, my decision.
i stopped reading after she started talking to T.
Question: even if Verizon wanted to be stellar customer service people (you know, if the planet's axis tilted, or something), would they even be ABLE to get the alert lifted? I thought that would be something only she would be able to do. I'd be somewhat uncomfortable with random entities being able to lift alerts from my credit report...
I worked for a Vz callcenter back in the days of the GTE merger... We commonly referred to callers as tickets because after about a thousand calls all saying the same thing every call becomes just another ticket.
We absolutely had time limits on calls, if we couldn't resolve an issue in 20 min clearly we did not have the tools to resolve it and it needed to be escalated to the next tier of morons. They weren't any smarter, better trained or much of anything, they just had access to another app to look more deeply into whatever they supported.
Like it or not, callcenter employees are, in fact, human. Sometimes we had bad days, sometimes that came thru on calls, sometimes we got fired for it - but usually it was a slap on the wrist by QA if we happened to get monitored on that specific call. One of our managers would require us to call the customer back with them live monitoring to apologize and resolve the issue on that call with no transfers, but that wasn't required - just the best possible solution to a horrible customer experience.
It sucks that it happens like this, but that's the reality of dealing with human beings. We do dumb shit sometimes.
@aja175:
Metrics play a roll in any call center but that merger with BAM was about ten years ago. The entire telecom industry has changed since then.
Personally, I don't allow anyone access to my checking account. If they need it, i won't do business. Most companies will allow you to attach a credit card. Your get an extra layer of protection and "rewards" if you pay off your bill monthly. In the case of most consumer service problems show up at a retail office and refuse to leave until your issue is addressed. Repeat as needed (legitimate issues that are not be solved in other channels).
@alulim: I do use autopay. With a credit card. But it's a virtual number that can be used multiple times, but only by a single merchant. Solves the potential identity theft issue, gets me rebate bucks, and keeps me from having to keep track of the damn e-bills.
Like other readers, I too, am floored. That was one of the funniest consumerist stories ever. It may also be the ultimate Verizon story, because it covers all the bases of dealing with that insane, incompetent company. I wish they would just go out of business already, I have had my own dealings with them in purchasing, and then canceling a cell-phone purchase. A simple attempt to return the phone became a many months nightmare, as they just keot billing me for this phone long after I returned it. Same thing happened with my brother. But I got the feeling the OP was talking about a landline, didn't anyone else? Does it matter?
It seems that because the OP is a reporter in her job, she remembered every detail. Her story sounds very balanced, the way a reporter is supposed to be (ideally.) When someone was nice and helpful, she says so.
Why is everyone obsessing over the fact that the OP wanted Verizon to lift the fraud alert? If you read the story, she only put it on there after their security people strongly urged her to do it because they said that there had been a major security breach on her account on the part of Verizon. So why the victim-blaming? I would have been totally flipped-out if told, there has been a major security breach, that I needed to put on a fraud alert immediately!
This T maniac didn't tell her she needed to put out a fraud alert because her checkbook had been stolen, but because he said that Verizon had discovered a major security breach. This breach which had occurred after they started sending her bills to a total stranger. What was she supposed to do, be real happy?
Then, they told her that there actually never was a security breach, that it was just a case of internal Verizon computer error that should have been easily fixed by Verizon six months beforehand.
What did people expect OP to do other than keep trying to get results any way she could to resolve this problem?
Here's another thing, she called the business office, and it was they who put the guy on the phone who waited with her for 20 minutes. So why label her frustration as emotional blackmail? That reaction is worthy of T, who is now also *my favorite Verizon employee.* And this guy was a professional? A professional psycho, maybe! I hope Verizon is doing the cringing while they read this!
If I had an employee from a company like Verizon call me up and be this outright insane, I don't know how I would have handled it, but it seems like every time OP tried to get resolutions, she ran into someone even more incompetent and/or crazy.
So why all the posts making excuses for Verizon? Why all the love? And, conversely, why all the victim-blaming?
That crazy Verizon guy T kept talking about Harriett being a writer. They screwed up her account, why did they keep asking personal questions? I would be super offended. But since T knew she was a journalist, didn't he assume that she would possibly write about him? You would think this would cause T to chill with the cursing and other craziness! He was one scary dude, and verizon is the wackest company.
This company did not do one single thing right for the OP, no matter how much effort she made to rectify things. Every step of the way, they blundered, taking 6 mos to rectify a simple computer error. Is this the future for all of us? Kafka combined with Brave New World?
I know I'm putting a toe across the blame-the-victim line here, but after reading all the way through, I've been left with the impression that if I were a Verizon employee, and a disgruntled customer called up and talked at me in the fashion in which that saga was written, I might not know which end was up either ...
And why the obsession with the guy calling her a "ticket"? My dad uses this expression. It just means someone is a hoot. That the speaker is getting a kick out of someone. Etc. Sure, it's overly familiar for someone in customer-service mode to be using, but it's not vaguely harassing or lecherous. He was telling her, hey, you're a funny/quirky/interesting person. Maybe a dumb way to try to lighten the mood, but that's about all.
The thing I really sympathized about was the stupid e-center that apparently doesn't exist/can never be reached. That part rang totally true and would be teeth-grindingly annoying to have to deal with.
Hariette touches upon a universal frustration many of us deal with when talking to faceless bureaucrats. I found this piece well written and hilariously entertaining. The dialogue was so fluid, I felt like I was experiencing her phone calls and her frustration! A verizon employee admitting he's calling you from his car phone?! How can you not find the humor in this situation? I absolutely loved it!
While her story was certainly more than a little insane, it strikes me as odd that as a result she expects compensation, and further that she expects Verizon to get the fraud report lifted. She was the one who got the fraud flagged on her reports - under a Verizon agent's advice (and tbh, she should have done that when her checkbook was stolen) but it was her choice to do so and it isn't his fault she did. Verizon writing to the credit agencies would probably do no good anyway - who are they to request the alert be lifted? It isn't as if the accounts are theirs.