Cook’s Collaborative Edge

Last night I wrote to my list

Interesting

I just got a phone call at 5 pm on a saturday from a Velma Stoner. i think the office of customer relations - we are in ivan Seidenberg’s office she said. She has a copy of my first mail list complaint forwarded to her by Fred Briggs Exec VP of operations. She wanted to make sure that my issue was resolved. She asked if i would talk to Fred Briggs later in the week and help them figure out what they were doing wrong. I would. She led me to believe that they would give me a human name and contact number from whom i could get help in the future. That idea I like.

But of course I have mixed feelings about all this. Were I not an ornery journalist i am sure i would have been ignored. They say they really want to find out how they goofed so they can do better. I have doubts that anything positive will come of it, but I will talk with them and give them my point of view if they are interested in listening which they seem to be. As I joked with Velma - after all you are the only american phone company that has been my customer for a decade.

Doc Searls responded:

This is often my experience as well. I know I can usually get good results if the person on the other end of the phone knows that I’m a journalist or bothers to Google for my name.

But I think it’s a little different with Verizon. I think there are parts of the company that really do try hard to please, or at least to comply with customer support policies that try fail to overcome what amounts to a company that is, in many deep respects, FUBAR.

My own tale of woe with Verizon FiOS begins here…

… and gets worse. Long story short, the company’s online sign-up service for FiOS is so wacky and bad that I ended up with two orders that collided, resulting in a cancellation of service that could only be corrected, finally, when a tech support guy in Rhode Island actually gave me his personal number to call back, explaining that he was breaking the rules because, I’m not kidding, he’s from Massachusetts. “I’m from Boston. You’re in Arlington. I try to look out for people from Mass.” I didn’t tell him that I had just moved here from California, or that I’m really from New Jersey .

But that wasn’t the end of it. The STB (Set Top Box) keeps failing. Typical problems are 1) Pixellation on a number of “channels”; 2) “Channel not available” on many HD “channels”; and 3) a blank screen with no sound.

The only way to fix these, I thought until last night, was to call up the tech support number and have the robot at the call center diagnose the problem and reset the box remotely. This time, however, that didn’t quite work. So the robot eventually told me a human would call in half an hour. One did, and he was, as the rules obviously require, apologetic to the verge of annoyance.

What mattered, however, was that he gave me the rundown on several serious bugs that Verizon had no apparent interest in fixing.

One is that the robot only reboots the STB, and that the better method is just to unplug it for half a minute and plug it in again, and forget calling tech support unless rebooting doesn’t work.

Another is that the blank screen is due to memory overflow, and that on some Motorola STBs, including ours (the top one), the RAM is too small for the job. He said there was no way he knew of fixing it, although “firmware changes are downloaded to your STB quite often.”

Another is that “Channel Unavailable” is a “network” problem that owes to Verizon being “new at this.” This came after I told him that, while Dish Network had some problems with HD in our Santa Barbara house, those were nothing compared to the glitch rate we experience with Verizon FiOS “cable.” Frankly, FiOS TV so unreliable that my wife doesn’t even bother watching because she counts on frequent failures followed by corrections too stupid or complex to hassle with.

Another is that the pixellation problem, which we experience only with local “channels”, is at the source. Local TV stations feeding into Verizon’s “cable” system sometimes just don’t have the bandwidth for the job. I’ll have to ask the WGBH folks about that, since it’s their local Channel 2 feed that is most often involved.

Of course, the whole idea of replicating cable TV on fiber is ludicrous. What Verizon should be doing is leapfrogging their cable and satellite competitors, especially on the Internet front. But instead they use the fattest pipes to play catch-up with their lame cable competitors. Dumb.

Meanwhile our local community’s mail list is thick with complaints about how slow FiOS is in reality. Some of the complaining is just uninformed about the nature of the Net. But the sum of it collectively suggests that Verizon is just not taking very good care of its Internet customers. What good is getting 10/5Mb service if there’s a half or a full second wait before a page even begins to load while the browser says, for example, “waiting for Google?” We have Mac, Windows and Linux boxes here, and even hooked up by Ethernet to the router the apparent speed is remarkably not-fast. It’s like you have to wake something up every time you click on a link.

By contrast, when i take one of the laptops in to Harvard, everything works fast. No wait. Why the difference?

Could it be that Verizon is a wannabe cable company with Internet running on the side? That’s my bet.

Trackback URI | Comments RSS