How frustrating when Verizon, the gold standard of American incumbents has in FiOS Internet an excellent product but then driven by the greed of the bean counters, takes a devil may care attitude to sell at any cost this much is possible because the only thing that matters is that quarterly bottom line keep the executives paid in the shareholders happy.
I have been a 10 meg by two meg Fios Internet customer since October 19 and once they managed to bill me properly, the service’s been excellent and I am quite satisfied. Indeed earlier today I watched real-time streams of the Olympic opening ceremonies from German TV and captured images almost 6” x 10” that were the most stunningly clear and large I have ever seen from Internet protocol TV streaming on my large Apple monitor.
OK the praise is finished. Now the brickbats. In door to door selling in New Jersey at least in two townships that I have identified and so far — they are the only two that I have actually spoken to the proper authorities, — is selling Fios triple play door-to-door via the sales agents, presumably on commission, and who in Bordentown NJ and Ewing NJ have been selling in the case of Ewing for over a year without legally required peddlers licenses. (The licenses presumably will give dissatisfied customer a place to go when they are mistreated.)
On the basis of my 42-year-old son’s experience, these d2d peddlers oversell, overpromise, fill out the forms sloppily, do not sign the blank where their name is supposed to be filled in, do not have the customer initial at the point of every charge as agreeing and as the contract specifies is mandatory – this is but a short list of the problems.
The contract itself is a Verizon FiOS document, clearly marked as New Jersey sales order form. The only indication on the document that the order taker is not a Verizon employee is one that phrase at the bottom that states “D2D agent” must have customer initial. A jpeg is available below.
The contract is a murky mass of bundled agreements and extras and packages added on to packages such that it would take a Teletruth agent like Tom Allibone of New Jersey going through it line by line over a 75 minutes on the phone with me to figure out what was going on.
And even then on the back, in fine print, you read under the heading bundle service agreement: “bundled customers must sign the bundle service agreement online at www.Verizon.net/fiosbundleterms within 30 days after installation of services. If the agreement is not accepted within this time frame, bundled discounts will not appear. Standard retail prices will apply.” So there is another time bomb waiting to blow up in the faces of Verizon customers.
The very last line of page one says to the unfortunate customer: please call 888-553-1555 with questions. I did call this number and it turned out to be a general Verizon number that dumps me in to a menu of general consumer choices that I decided not to waste my time on.
Shuck off Responsibility to an Outside Vendor and then don’t audit that vendor with care
What Verizon has done is hire an outside vendor called TRG – apparently one of several vendors to sign up hundreds of kids eager for sales commissions and set the hordes loose on the doors of towns where the FiOS is available.
When the bill comes to my son, he finds that the services given as 90 day free promotions are billed for - contrary to the written contract. A $30 installation fee that is specifically marked on the contract as free is also billed for. And two in-house outlets at $55 each for a total of $110 are billed for when they weren’t not ordered or installed.
My son did, fortunately demand some identification from the agent who signed “Todd” and left a 724-987-3031 phone number. Calling the number, the person who answered presumably eight TRG employee and probably following a script said “I’m sorry sir it was a misunderstanding we cannot give you those discounts but I will offer you $10 a month off for the life of the contract” - — this is a $117 basic contract with $48 a month of extras. With a rate for the two year version of 117 versus 112 for the one-year version and a virtual promise that rates will be raised at the end of 24 months! BTW I called the number and got an answering machine, left a message and never received a callback.
My son said: this is a contract I have it in writing you are telling me that you will not abide by this contract? The answer was the same. Demanding a supervisor, my son still received the same answer. This was a misunderstanding the paperwork you have does not matter and the only thing we can do is offer you a $10 a month discount. My son by this point was angry and he said I don’t want any of these services turn them off all of them. (He also said I want my phone restored to copper. That is impossible sir. No you are wrong it is possible… I did not let them rip the copper out. No you are mistaken sir it is not possible to go back to copper.
When Service Restored it is Wrong Service
They said okay we will disconnect and on Monday, July 28 his television, telephone, and Internet service were disconnected. He told me that I did remember Dad, you said not under any circumstances to let them rip out the copper. The copper is still there And so late Monday having had to go out and buy a prepaid cell phone he started calling Verizon to try to get his COPPER service restored.
It turned out that on Tuesday the 29th someone entered into the system in order to restore his FiOS service. NOTE - FiOS not copper. At the end of the week he still had no phone service and his cell phone was basically unreachable.
I began doing what I could including calling 212 number I was given last fall when verizon messed up my FiOS billing This is the number of an office that turns out to be called Verizon Executive Customer Relations in New York City. Nice people but turned out to be worse than useless. Last Monday a woman named Tammy said: oh yes Gordon Cook I remember your son - same name right? - called us this morning and we are helping him out and we absolutely are connecting him with the person who can rectify this problem. The next morning I called back after my son told me know he did not call them on Monday. “I last talked to them either Thursday or Friday,” he said.
So Stacey told me she would get someone who can help and left me hanging on a blank line for 15 minutes! When in disgust I hung up and redialed, Stacy answered again apologized and said I will bring someone to the phone immediately. After s 90 second wait a Miss Mitchell appeared who said I will look up the records on 609-882-2572 since I understand that this is the disconnected number. I immediately said: no no no. Too late she was gone. After another five minutes – fuming by now – I gave up and hung up. The number she quoted me was MY NUMBER not my son’s. When I called back again I got a recorded “all our agents are busy” answer. Worse than useless - not what you would call competent.
My son was experiencing the same thing with his pay by minute cell phone – calling being placed on hold for hours in being transferred from pillar to post with everything from promises fix to we can’t find records, to what is your name and how do I get back to you, to sorry that information is not available.
When Drowning Call Your Verizon VP for help if you are lucky enough to know one
In desperation and knowing the Vice President of Federal Relations in Washington DC, I contacted him, and got through to him directly - since of course I had this direct phone number and I am happy to report that he transferred my problem to someone who actually did something.
The next morning I get a phone call from a Joe Parisi when Boston who is ordering the Bordentown Central office to get on the situation and get service restored. By mid-afternoon lo and behold he had a working telephone. But by early evening we found out in another call with Joe that it was a Fios telephone and presumably $50 a month plus $15-$20 in extra taxes and fees rather than a copper plain-vanilla no extras phone that my son had ordered on July 28 29th that should have build out at $19.55 a month. Poor Joe was not happy when he found out that the FiOS retention people had not heard that copper was desired and took a solid week to reinstall the unwanted FiOS service. And now that FiOS was back it was not what was wanted.
And yesterday I found out that after a session with the FiOS retention squad my son had agreed to FiOS phone service and Fios Internet service and no television and $20 off on the life of the contract plus a promise that he would not be billed $30 for installation, that there would be no billing for the extra calls and the bogus $110 bill for sockets that were not installed would be removed.
Enter the Director of FiOS D2D sales NJ
Now yesterday at my request Joe had Tammy Dietz who is a Verizon full-time employee in charge of door to door sales of FiOS in New Jersey called me. I went over what happened in some detail with Tammy who was a very nice, professional, but somewhat defensive lady. She assured me that this was an exceptional aberration and that one salesperson must’ve strayed outside of the territory and sold in Bordentown where he should not and assured me that he would be promptly fired.
She also assured me that they worked meticulously with every outside vendor including TRG to let them know that they must never sell in a New Jersey township without full complete proper and legal peddlers licenses. Almost every township in New Jersey has this requirement and praise be it generally keeps door-to-door salesman from bothering us.
But as I explained to Tammy at least since mid-June door-to-door salesman had been selling in Bordentown and were apparently continuing to sell because the police department told me that I was the second person on that very day to call with a complaint about a Fios sale and explained that she could not remember the last time she issued a peddler’s license for Bordentown.
Tammy said she’d look into this and get back to me. So far I haven’t heard from her. Why am I not surprised? Well for one reason I called my own township – Ewing and spoke to be a responsible person in the clerk’s office who told me that Verizon had applied in June of this year for peddlers permits but did not yet have a valid permits and would not for another week or 10 days. Were they permitted in Ewing Township in 2007? Absolutely not came the reply.
Well I can state from my own direct knowledge that from some point in 2006 throughout 2007 Verizon door-to-door salespeople were selling on my street and indeed probably the majority of home owners on the street have purchased some kind of FiOS services. How many problems in how many complaints? I don’t know - finding out has not been and should not be my full-time occupation. One immediate neighbor was sold a triple play two months ago and I need to ask you whether it was buying mail or door to door. He told me he was satisfied. They were knocking on my door last summer and all I remember is that they were coming from a company with headquarters in New Brunswick. Now most New Jersey residents including myself very likely do not realize that they are protected by peddlers laws from these kinds of sales intrusions. Folk by and large don’t realize that if they want the pesetering to stop they should call their local government.
These peddlers laws it turns out are there for very good reason. Because it also turns out that, if you have a problem with this very complex highly confusingly presented triple play service that does include the very basic and vital wireline aspect of your communication with the outside world, you may well find out, as did my son, that if you are billed for something you did not agree to you are out of luck and getting someone at Verizon to do something on your behalf is almost impossible.
I mean what are you supposed to do if you do not know a Verizon vice president? The New Jersey legislature rolled over and played dead for Verizon and the spring of 2006. The New Jersey Board of public utilities is not enforcing anything anymore. Under the Republican free-market way of life, consumer advocate regulatory help has been disbanded. So here we are vulnerable and largely helpless when one part of a Fortune 50 company with a good technical product somehow capitulates to its marketing arm for a shoddy non verizon supplier who with every reason to over sell is able — by being just a verizon agent — to treat the customer as sucker and when they don’t bother to register with local authorities you have plenty of opportunity for problems to arise and no reasonable way for customers to satisfy those problems.
It goes out ignoring the law in at least two instances Bordentown and Ewing of which I am aware and does the hard sell. It is too bad because as my wife said Verizon has a decent product and people would buy it without them stooping to this kind of selling.
Meanwhile you can find JPEG’s of my son’s contract page 1 here and page 2 here and the appropriate page of his first bill here. I would hope the JPEG’s of the contract would be passed around to help people understand the difficulties into which they may be getting. Because once getting in getting out is not easy.
Customers - go away
Are you thinking you can identify the appropriate decision-makers in Verizon? Good luck. Apparently the person in charge of FiOS New Jersey is named Tammy Deitz.. And there is someone named Joe Parisi in Boston whom I must say did a conscientious and professional job. But an e-mail address for either - no. A listing of the companies they employ other than TRG? No! Anyone responsible for ensuring that their contractors obey New Jersey State laws? No. Anyone responsible for deciding in what townships they do door-to-door campaigns? No. Anyone in Verizon monirtoring any of this? If so I can’t find them. I called the Mayor’s Office in Princeton yesterday. Not surprisingly an extremely wealthy Princeton they are not going door to door and are selling by mail only. This is what they ought to do.
But again someone there should realize this is the sad story that does result when they do make the investment to bring fiber to the home and then destroy the goodwill that might result from that investment with the kind of behavior I have outlined and with stonewalling that makes it virtually impossible for any mistreated customer to get any kind of justice. Unless they know a Verizon vice president. Now why do I think there is an incentive to oversell, and over bill and have no recourse for your customer to follow? I would love to know how many give up and pay the higher amount because they have not the time or strength to fight.