customer disservce, thy name ist Verizon

Dani and I have had a (family) cell-phone plan with Verizon for more than two years. This means we're elligible to upgrade phones, but we hadn't done anything about it because our plain old phones are mostly fine. Our biggest complaint has been battery life (if Verizon would just send us batteries we'd be happy), and a couple weeks ago we bought batteries.

Wednesday Dani's phone died. (Mine is fine so far, so we don't immediately suspect that the battery did damage.) We have no particular reason to change providers, so Thursday over lunch he went to a Verizon store downtown to look at phones and ask some questions (namely, is this a use-it-or-lose-it upgrade event for me too if he upgrades?). He came back from that with the information that there would be financial benefits to upgrading together, so last night we went to the Verizon store in Monroeville to do that. That's where the trouble started.

( Read more... )

Verizon is currently sending me small Amazon gift certificates in exchange for customer feedback, so I think I'll see what they have to say about this. I wonder if I'll still be welcome in the focus group next week. :-)