How Verizon treats its customers, and why you should care

Recently I was going through the usual routine of monthly bill paying, at the usual time. Luddite that I am, I still pay a lot of my bills by writing checks and sending them through the mail. (Luddite, yes, but a Luddite who wrote an enterprise web server, and lots of other advanced software, for the university where I once worked. I'm not a complete technophobe.)

My bills all arrive through the mail, too. But this time the Verizon bill was uncharacteristically late. Wanting to wrap up the process, I decided to write a check and send it without a payment stub, in my own envelope. I already knew the amount of the bill.

But where to send it? I consulted my old, saved Verizon invoices, but they had no address to which to remit a payment. I went to Verizon's web site. Same thing: There was no payment address to be found. Verizon wasn't being very helpful.

I did some sort of Google search, the details of which I've forgotten. I found a web page where someone answered my question posed by somebody else: Where to send a payment? A Verizon address in Texas was given. I now know, but didn't at the time, that my payments go to New Jersey.

I wrote out the check, put my account number on it, and mailed it to the Texas address, more than a week before the bill's due date. I figured that if the address wasn't correct, some helpful Verizon employee in Texas would send it on to the proper destination. If it wasn't a legitimate Verizon address (turns out, it was), the post office would return the improperly addressed envelope to me. And worst case, if the check didn't make it to the right place, the current bill's amount would be included on next month's bill and I'd pay it all then.

So, no big deal. Just trying to pay my bill.

It didn't surprise me, although it seemed a tad aggressive, when, sometime later, my wife told me she'd received a communication from Verizon on her phone saying the bill was past due, and demanding payment. I have a phone too, but—you might find this amazing—I don't much use it. I never give out the number to acquaintances, because it isn't a reliable way to contact me. I carry the phone in case of emergencies, since I work by myself in a remote area and might need to call for help. But I don't participate in the whole texting ecosystem. Any messages that might have come to my phone wouldn't have been noticed. You can, however, reliably leave a message on my home answering machine.

Some days later my wife reported another threatening message from Verizon. This was still well before I'd even received the next bill. Finally that bill arrived, and it included the current charges plus the previous month's charges. I wrote a check for the full amount and mailed it immediately.

That very evening my wife came home from work and said she had some bad news: Verizon had disconnected her phone. Whenever she tried to use it, she was redirected to an automated system that demanded a credit card number to make an immediate payment. Same thing on my phone. By that point I'd mailed Verizon two checks, both well before the due dates.

I was furious. What kind of company behaves this way? I needed to talk to somebody to get it all straightened out. Ha! Just try. Seriously, just try. Verizon has become one of those companies that really really doesn't want you to be able to talk to a human being.

Trying to contact Verizon's "customer service" (I use the term very sarcastically) via the two cell phones was a non-starter. I just got funneled into the automated system that demanded a credit card number and would not do anything else.

I checked an old Verizon invoice and saw there was an 800 number under the heading "Questions about your bill?" Oh, I had questions, all right. I called the 800 number. Another automated system. You have to key in the phone number associated with the bill in question. When I did so, I got funneled back into the automated system demanding a credit card number, and nothing else.

I went round and round in a loop, with no apparent way to break out. If you've ever been stuck in an automated menu system, you might have learned that one way to signal your strong desire to speak to a live person is to press "0" in response to all the prompts. Some companies actually have the decency to allow you to break out of the system in which you're trapped, and connect you to an account representative.

Verizon kept demanding a credit card number, and I kept pressing "0". It ignored me, at first, but finally relented. I'm not sure if it demanded enough 0s on my part in order to be sure I wasn't going to capitulate, or whether it simply bailed out of the loop we were in because it kept failing to get what it wanted. The Verizon system did seem to acknowledge my desire to speak to a person when it warned that there would be a $10 "agent fee" if I proceeded. Can you imagine? A fee for a Verizon customer to talk to a Verizon representative.

So I finally got through to a live person, but by this time I was boiling mad, shaking in fury, with the ten dollar fee being the final straw. I recounted everything that had happened, but my anger was spilling out uncontrollably. The person on the other end reflected some of it back at me, apparently indignant that I was saying so many nasty things about my experience with her company. At some point she apparently concluded, for whatever reason, that she wasn't the correct person to help me, and connected me to somebody else. Maybe she didn't have the authority to do anything useful, so she kicked it up to a higher level. Or maybe she just didn't like my attitude.

I told my whole story yet again. This was all Verizon's fault from the beginning, I said. Your bill was late, I said, which was what got this whole mess started in the first place. I've been trying all along to pay my bill, I said. And what kind of company would treat a customer who's been reliably paying his bills for decades in such a heavy-handed way, without even allowing a second billing cycle, that would normally get it all straightened out, to complete? And that $10 "agent fee" is bullshit, I said. So was the $7 late fee I'd been charged on the latest bill. She agreed to remove both fees.

We went through how I'd already mailed the latest payment, way before the due date, that included both months' charges. She agreed to defer any further action for a couple of weeks in order to allow that latest payment to arrive and be processed. We went through a rigamarole that was more tedious than it ought to have been to get the two phones turned back on and operating.

So things seemed to have gotten turned around and were heading back in the right direction. I was calming back down. Then along comes the most recent Verizon bill, and it was $40 more than normal. Why? Two $20 "reconnect" fees to get the two phones reactivated. They will stab and screw you every step of the way. This is Verizon being its true self.

I obviously needed to talk to a customer service rep to get this latest insult fixed. But as I said, allowing you to talk to an actual person is no longer part of Verizon's customer service model. Back to the 800 number. Back to fighting with the automated voice response system, looping repeatedly through the prompts, continually pressing "0" and having the bot on the remote end feigning confusion. You should try it sometime. Somehow the obvious resolution to confusion on Verizon's end—letting a person with a thinking brain intervene—is always the last resort, allowed grudgingly if at all.

But I was—thank the heavens!—eventually connected to a nice lady who was interested in assisting me, and who had the knowledge and ability to do so. It took an hour or more of work, but we plowed through all the mess, with some difficulty, and her making lots of annotations into the system on her end. She removed the two reconnect fees. Then we proceeded to the thorny problem of what happened to that original check that I'd sent to Texas. By then I knew it had actually cleared the bank 11 days after I sent it, and long before my phones were disconnected. According to my bank statement, it was cashed by an entity called "Verizon Financial Payments." But the payment was never credited to my account. As I write this, we still don't know where the money went. The nice lady initiated a process on her end to conduct a trace. I hope I'll eventually get my money back.

My point in describing this sorry affair is not to just add my story to the multitudes of others about the frustrations of consumers dealing with the bureaucratic incompetence of large corporations. The maltreatment of customers demonstrated here isn't just incompetence; it's willful brutish malice. It's a deliberate choice. My point is to ask you to consider whether Verizon is the kind of company with which you want to have a relationship.

Mistakes, like late bills, and even late payments, happen. But Verizon's response every step of the way was heavy-handed and even downright ruthless, apparently because it thinks the power dynamics at play allow it to behave that way. Do you really want to patronize a company that would treat you the way Verizon treated me? That would turn off your phones at the drop of a hat, without reasonable due process, and without providing a reasonable channel for redress?

The Verizon rep who I initially spoke to, who passed me off to the second rep who eventually got my phones reconnected, said with some irritation at me that "we don't disconnect peoples' phones." By "we" she meant that she, and other human beings like her, don't turn off phones. Of course she doesn't! It's all automated, done by mindless machines running software that mindlessly implements the company's policies. The system worked flawlessly, exactly as it was designed, according to rules programmed into the system. The difficulty of customers speaking to a human being is also a deliberate choice made by Verizon, because serving your customers personally is a pain, a cost to be avoided, and so very passé.

Thus has Verizon organized its business in this very manner, to wear down customers rather than serve them. If all goes well, you may never notice. But heaven help you if there's any difficulty.

In recent years, a lot of large companies have found it is possible and indeed profitable to not interact personally with their customers. They have calculated that they can get away with simply not providing a level of service that was once taken for granted. Given the power dynamics involved, customers are mostly helpless anyway. What are they going to do? Many, not willing to be beaten down in a grueling drawn out fight, would simply have provided a credit card number in the first instance, and then paid the $40 in reconnect fees, plus the late fee. Verizon could not care less about the ill will this would engender, as long as the customer remains locked in his relationship with the company.

Here's what customers can do. They can switch. It's a pain, but it's the correct response. They can seek another provider that doesn't treat its customers so despicably. That's what I'm going to do. And persons who have suffered this despicable treatment can publicize as broadly as possible what they've experienced. A company's good reputation used to be an intangible asset—what accountants call "goodwill" that can actually be assigned a monetary value on balance sheets. We need for a company's bad reputation to be a liability. It's clear that only customers, or the lack of them, can ensure that companies behave decently. If we don't demand it, we'll not get it.

Update Oct 4, 2023: In a story yesterday on the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, NPR described a couple's struggles with a large, powerful phone company. The couple "decided they didn't need their landline anymore, and they ended the service. But the phone company continued to bill them and bill them, and it ended up affecting Philip Glover's credit." After Mr. Glover contacted the CFPB, he got a letter from the phone company saying the improper charges "would be removed from my credit report and that I wouldn't be hearing from them again on that matter." That company was Verizon.

Copyright (C) 2023 James Michael Brennan, All Rights Reserved

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