Customer-Service Cluelessness

New York Time Circuits columnist, David Pogue, describes a phenomenon that seems to be spreading through the service industries: that of not delivering on specified services until called on it by the customer and then repeating it again the following month. His example was of signing up for a 800 minute/month cell phone offer.

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/10/30/technology/circuits/30POGUE-EMAIL.html

Lured by the promise of relatively good cellular coverage, I bought a Verizon cellphone in August. The deal was good, too: 800 anytime minutes, 1000 minutes of calls to other Verizon customers (like my wife), unlimited night and weekend calls, all for $60 a month. A few days after signing up for the plan, a welcome letter arrived in the mail, congratulating me for signing up for—oops!—the 700 minutes plan. Of course, it should have said "800 minutes."

I called Verizon. "Don’t worry," the lady told me. "You signed up for the 700-minute plan with a 100-minute-a-month bonus. When you get your bill, you’ll see 800 minutes of airtime free." As you can probably guess, I did not, in fact, get those extra 100 minutes. For two straight months, I had to call Verizon and ask them to fix it. Each time, they apologized and gave me the 100-minute credit. But each time, I lost 25 minutes of my life.

Addendum: There was an interesting follow-up to this report the following week:
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/11/06/technology/circuits/06POGUE-EMAIL.html

Posted by Tom on October 30, 2003