Verizon redeems itself - for me, at least
Last week, you may recall my writing of a small ordeal in getting our FiOS phone line fixed. The problem was not so much that the line went out - in a storm, lines break - nor was it the response time of the company. It was the broken process Verizon used, where they demanded entry to the house just in case the problem was indoors, though I had to go away for several days to the Carlisle show; and apparently they needed this entry (a) just in case the problem was indoors, and (b) because as a mere customer, I obviously could not be trusted to see that the green light next to “NETWORK” was off while the green light next to “POWER” was on.
Not long after writing that weblog entry, I got a call from Verizon, a routine “moment of truth” phone survey of the type I used to set up. I answered the questions and was asked if I’d mind getting a followup call from Verizon. Surprisingly, I got such a call two days later, from a supervisor at Verizon. He was interested in what had happened, and readily agreed that the symptoms (complete service outage during a storm, with no power problems) was almost certainly “up at the pole.” He was respectful of my time and intelligence, and I suspect that the repairs process is being rewritten as we speak - or has already been rewritten.
If nothing else, this shows that there is hope for any organization where at least some people care enough to do the right thing - whether by a complex, trendy process (cascading balanced scorecards) or by a simple old standby (customer surveys and process reengineering).
Now, if only they would fix the programming in my router and TV box… but given their freedom from outages until now, and their handling of this one, I’m not in danger of wandering over to Cablevision any time soon.
[...] PS> Verizon redeemed itself! [...]
DaveAdmin,
I work for Verizon. You described the process associated with our adoption of Net Promoter Score.
While I am happy the NPS recovery worked as designed, I am sorry your initial experience was less than stellar. I’d love to discuss if you have the time.
I have time, but not today. You know my phone number… and you have all the facts. There’s not much more to say, other than that you really, really, really need better TV-box programmers… to eliminate that long, long delay between channels, the weekly crashes, etc… (and Favorites should be the DEFAULT for changing channels or viewing TV guides since you have so many duplicate and special-interest channels.)
Unfortunately I do not have the info. All I know is DaveAdmin. Looked in the earlier message too.
My email is maguire@verizon.com. Feel free to reach out when you have time. I understand that you are busy, so I do not want to impose.
My question is for the Verizon man………. are you folks monitoring the web site “twitter” If not, I suggest you do make an effort to start. I am advising Dave, and everyone else that sees how a company customer service issues are handled like some sort of aggravation, to utilize that site.
At this point there’s no need. The guy who called the other day about the processes also sent a man around yesterday to verify and troubleshoot my other complaints. Last night a call to the service center for more troubleshooting APPEARS to have resolved the problems…
… in response to the comment not worth posting, the problem occurred under Windows, too. I only use Windows for testing because [cough] I want my computer to do what I want it to do, when I want it to do it… without wasting time on viruses, trojans, constant software updates, spyware, system registries…