In July I canceled Verizon’s TV service and switched over to YouTube TV - in the end, I got more channels and paid less, so it’s a win. I then turned in my equipment and (mercifully) kept the receipt.
On August 5 I got a threatening letter saying I hadn’t turned in one of the boxes, so I called Verizon and eventually they agreed that I had turned it in (saying they looked up the receipt # I provided) and that they would fix the problem.
Yesterday at around 1AM I got an email saying that I hadn’t turned in the equipment and that $375 had been applied against my account. $375! I lost my shit and called them again, but was courteous - it’s really not the person on the other end’s fault - and she said she saw the email, but that no charge had been applied that she could see, but that she had flagged it to her supervisor, but her system couldn’t show her the receipt either.
I then filed complaints online with both the MA Dept of Telecommunications and Cable (DTC), and the FTC. Less than 30 minutes later (!) the DTC called me, asked me to send documentation, and said they’d be all over it. This morning Verizon called, incredibly apologetic, saying they could see the returned device in their system and that they’d be responding to both the DTC and FTC complaints, and would ‘monitor it personally’. I will note here, the DTC and FTC aren’t just logging it as a complaint, they’re getting involved.
In summary: how the fuck can your systems not manage either email threats or the scanning in of a returned device? You’re a goddamned telecommunications giant. And: complaining to someone with a regulatory hammer is pretty effective.
I’ve had similar problems with telecom companies and I’m convinced it’s intentional. No company of that size can possibly be so incompetent. I suspect they see these sorts of “mistakes” as revenue opportunities - people who don’t keep receipts, people who don’t follow up…
Good for you calling the watchdogs on them. I’ve done the same and even involved my congressional rep once.
I even had incredibly good success against CenturyLink (back when I had to deal with them as my only available telephone provider) employing the consumer complaints approach. They responded with alacrity when I got the Better Business Bureau and the Public Utilities Commission involved.
Like you, I recommend people be quicker to employ these agencies, or whichever others are appropriate for the service, if the company they’re dealing with is giving them the runaround.
I’ve always wondered why those companies even care about getting their hardware back. What do they do with a receiver/router that has been used for years and most probably is out of date technically? These devices are too cheap to refurbish and give them to new clients, so what else than recycling them makes sense? They could leave that to the client.
I work for a large company. I get my company-provided laptop “refreshed” from time to time. That means having a new one mailed to me, and then I mail back the old one. (We mostly don’t have onsite computer support anymore.) I always keep copies of all my documentation and receipts.
Because, you guessed it, my company frequently loses the computers of its own employees. So, there’s a steady bouncing of emails until someone manages to find the laptop I mailed them eight months ago.
For even more fun, as a low-level supervisor, any of mine employees who transfer to another org or leaves the company also has to mail their computer back. While I ask them to send me their documentations, employees on the way out are often not particularly focused. And then I get the fun of arguing sometime next year about where those laptops ended up.
This is all internal; no profit motive or malice involved, just incompetence. It’s amazing that anything gets done anywhere.
I beg to differ. I haven’t been a Verizon customer since 2018, but in the New York metro area I was long a customer of NYTEL which became NYNEX which became or was bought out by BellAtlantic which was then purchased by Verizon.
I wouldn’t describe them as across-the-board incompetent but their customer support services, including tech support, billing, appointments, service complaints and the like, holy shit did they ever stock up on cluelessness, idiocy, and a certain pleased-with-themselves imperviousness to logic and common sense.
I most often had to deal with them for internet services, initially DSL then FiOS.
I’ll add that my son does systems work for one of those companies that manages loyalty programs and customer emails for clients, and his current client is an older, large company (whose name you know) that has had multiple mergers, multiple systems, different loyalty programs, a complicated web of opt in/opt out rules, and add on top of that the fact that phone numbers pass from person to person and are inherently unreliable, and yet that’s sometimes the preferred vehicle for client contact.
In my mind that’s still a failure of that large company to address issues of integration, and I still think Verizon sucks, but I certainly see how it happens.
Months after renting a car a couple of years (in a place where there was no one to check it in when you dropped it off) ago we got the dreaded “the car was damaged in your possession” email. Luckily, I still had the timestamped pictures of said damage, with the rental car company sign clearly in the background from before we left their lot. This is a known scam by the rental car companies. We contacted the AGs office in the state of rental (NM) but their response left a lot to be desired; along the lines of they were so helpful that they got the company to drop the charge. I didn’t need a consumer advocate as I already had all the proof I needed, what I wanted was for the AG to take my complaint, along with the no-doubt countless others, maybe some on the exact same vehicle & prosecute their ass for fraud. ::sigh::
Emphasis on giant though. I will keep the name vague although I sure people can figure out where I was. I used to work at a cable company in Canada (that no longer exists). One day, I was dealing with an emailed customer complaint. It was a similar situation. The customer had returned his cable box to the nearest location that took our company’s equipment (not one of our offices, just a dropoff location because this was way out in the boonies). Despite this, he was getting a series of harassing letters saying “return it or else we will charge you for it”. When he would call in to talk to agents, they would not believe him and some of them talked to him as if they thought he had stolen the cable box.
I take a look into the situation and I find out that the mistake the customer made was a simple one that anyone could have made. He took the cable back to a place that handled our satellite division only. The satellite division was a separate company that we had bought years back and basically just changed the logo of. So they had their own warehouses and logistical chains and etc. and really the only thing we shared was the name of the company. And this was now the system my customer’s cable box was very slowly winding its way through. They don’t keep track of our hardware and we don’t keep track of theirs. Eventually this thing would find its way to a warehouse where someone would realize what it was and eventually they would ship it back to the proper location. But while all of this is going on, the customer keeps getting “where’s our goddamn box?” Fortunately, I was able to make the financial aspect of it go away and assure the customer that while we didn’t know where exactly it was at the moment, it wasn’t his problem to deal with anymore. I left lots of notes on the account to explain what happened and if anyone had any questions, talk to me directly. Ultimately it was just the inability of one part of the company to have a meaningful conversation with the other part until someone (me) picked up the phone and started calling warehouses to ask questions.
This was not an official policy where I worked but the company was certainly aware that customer inertia and a high bar to even being able to contact customer care was good for passive revenue generation. I’m pretty sure the very common thought of “it should be easier to cancel my account” is a fight that is still going on today and nothing will change until the government legislates that all the companies have to do it. There was a similar thing that happened with cell phone charges. The government (of Canada, mind you) said you can’t charge people a fee for activating a phone on your network. The companies, all of them, said okay, we’ll charge people a fee for something else instead. The government said nice try but that is some bullshit and the companies once again tried to figure out a way to weasel some fees in there.
The company I worked for absolutely refurbished equipment and sent it back out. The newest models were always in demand and we never had enough of them so these were chased down when customers left so we could send them back out again after refurbishment. Old stock was sent back out too. Even though it was old, it was newer than what some of the customers had. There were also times when we made upgrades to our system and old hardware just wouldn’t work anymore so absolutely everyone in a given area would need a new modem or cable box or both.
We had a chart which updated as each hardware generation came our or as legacy equipment was retired. For new stuff, it was a high price if you didn’t return it. For mid-range stuff, it was a lower price. For old stuff, it was take it to a recycling depot, we don’t even want to see it any more. That’s the fun part when I think about that customer I helped. No matter that that piece of equipment was, it is completely worthless to the company as it exists now and could not be added to the network even if someone wanted to (because the new system would not know what it was).
I should also mention, the charge is automatic and time-based and the customer agrees to it when they open their account. If the equipment is checked in before a certain time (I think it was a month after a customer closed an account), there was no charge. If it didn’t come back, the warning letters started going out automatically. It wasn’t that anyone “cared” per se. It was just the terms of the agreement. It was not a secret, people just didn’t read the fine print. As a former billing agent, the best advice I can offer you is to read your agreement, you may find some things in there that you are surprised to find you have already agreed to. Although having said that, your only remedy is to walk away at the time (or within a certain, limited period of time).
See, this is part of the problem. It shouldn’t be legal for separate companies to use the same name and logo. The customer didn’t make a “simple mistake”; they didn’t make a mistake at all. Believing a lie is not a mistake for the person who was lied to.
My mom had a similar issue with Verizon (that led to her canceling her Verizon account). She went to a store whose only signage was a big “Verizon” sign, in their trademarked style, and the employees there completely lied to her and ripped her off. And when she tried to complain to Verizon, they said that there was nothing they could do, because the store with the big Verizon sign was a completely different company that they had nothing to do with.
In other words, the only reason the company asked for it back was because they could charge customers for not returning it. Yes, it was in the Terms and Services that your company pretended that customers agreed to (not all courts have agreed with this pretense), but it was there because the company put it there. Because they wanted to rip off customers.
This thread reminds me of a problem I had with Sprint (maybe even US Telecom, pre-Sprint) back in the long distance carrier days. I signed up with them, never got a bill, then a few months later got a threatening letter from them saying my account was overdue. This happened repeatedly - no monthly bills then a threatening letter. I even put a note in with my payment saying “If you would send me a bill, I would pay it.” I finally called customer service and got it straightened out, they gave me some story about how they are two separate systems, yada yada… but how can you be so incompetent as to not even be able to send out a monthly bill? Yet still be able to track that it hasn’t been paid?
I just want to point out that I had the exact same experience with Verizon almost 20 years ago. In my case I told them to pound sand, I wasn’t paying them. They eventually put me in collections and when I disputed it with the collection company they couldn’t validate the debt since I still had the receipt. I like your solution much better - the way I handled it took years and a big hit to my credit score. I have never done business with Verizon or any of its affiliates since then and I never will. Interesting that they are still pulling the same scam - I’ll bet it accounts for a significant amount of revenue.
Great job @Maserschmidt. That shit makes my blood boil.
When fiber came to my neighborhood and I was finally able to cancel Cox at least they were efficient at taking back their equipment and not billing me anymore. You better believe I documented everything though.
Around ten years ago Charter/Spectrum bought Time Warner. A couple of weeks ago they bought Cox. May god have mercy on anyone having to deal with that mess.
With Cox, my issue was them forcing me to use the equipment they sent me, and then when my service stopped working due to their equipment, they claimed that it was due to the equipment they sent me, which, since it was inside my home, wasn’t their responsibility, and so they’d charge me to repair it and restore the service they were supposedly providing me.
A few years ago, the mail-order pharmacy associated with my health insurance provider was failing to send the prescribed medications I needed, so I complained to the State Board of Pharmacy. The response was immediate and amazing. I heard from someone on the state board and then from, I think, the head pharmacist at the pharmacy.
In short, a complaint to the regulators can work wonders.
I have posted several times in my pit thread on The US “Healthcare” system where I have complained to the state insurance commissioner or the attorney general’s office and get results in days after going around and around for months with folks who are just openly breaking the law. Unfortunately, they are counting on patients (sheep to be sheared) not being as persistent.