My call to Verizon FIOS customer service seemed simple and straightforward.
For the few months, I had been battling an annoying issue where my DVR just wouldn't record certain shows. Tech support couldn't figure it out. Finally, after doing some thinking about it myself, I came up with the solution that tech support missed -- apparently my model of DVR could not "conflict" on the same channel. For example, if I had one show recording on CBS from 8:59pm to 10:01pm, and then another show from 9:59pm to 11:01pm, those 2 minutes where they both were recording (even if on the same channel) would confuse the hell out of the machine and it would go haywire, and would just stop recording everything. Tech support didn't know about this, but I came to this conclusion myself, and it turned out I was right.
My call to customer service was to request one month's credit for my DVR service -- about $20 -- for all the shows I missed and for tech support's inability to solve the problem for all this time.
Surprisingly, I was refused. I was told that credits like that were only given for "actual outages", not for box malfunctions. The rep didn't care about the ongoing nature of this problem, or my ability to prove it had existed. I asked for her supervisor.
The supervisor was even worse. He looked at my account and saw that I had previous credits on my bill within the past few months. I explained these were from a billing error, but he didn't want to hear it.
"I see you always call up and ask for credits for things," he said. "We can't keep doing this for you."
When I told him that the past "credits" were to fix actual mistakes on my bill, he told me that "the notes say otherwise."
Unbelievably, he condescendingly told me, "It looks like you're having trouble affording the amount of your bill every month, since you keep calling up asking for credit. I'm going to go over the services you have and we're going to see which ones you'd like to cancel, so you can better afford your service."
I went off on him at that point. He insisted that he didn't mean that comment offensively, but obviously he did. After a few minutes of arguing, he abruptly hung up on me.
What went wrong?
It turned out my problem wasn't my issue or my request, but the time I was calling.
It was 2:00am Pacific time. At the time I was happy that Verizon had 24/7 customer service. I learned that this was actually a negative, not a positive.
I called back during business hours and learned something interesting. After 8pm, Verizon forwards their customer service lines to a third party company. I was told that they've had "many complaints" about that company being rude, uncooperative, and/or inappropriate to customers. And why shouldn't they be? None of those people work for Verizon. They have no company loyalty, are paid less, and the hiring standards for such people are much lower than for reps of Verizon itself. The person I spoke to was very nice, instantly gave me the credit, and advised me to call during business hours if I wanted to avoid this mess in the future. It was good advice.
Apparently this is common among companies with 24/7 customer service lines. Since it is expensive to staff so many hours with real employees, they tend to farm out the "off hours" to third-party companies for cheap. Whether the third-party company is abroad or in the US (the one I dealt with here was domestic, making it harder to realize what was going on), you're going to get shoddy service.
Always call during business hours, and your life will be a lot easier.
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