Customer Experience Review: Verizon, Time Warner, PC Richard

I decided to have a look at the Time Warner Cable site for myself. I managed to get to their New York City web site, and in trying to find information on basic cable was faced with an unsupported browser message (see below).

Browser detection code has always irked me. Just what sort of fancy-pants functionality do they have that requires me to have specific browser versions?

I'm running Mozilla Firefox 0.9.2.

------------------------------------------------
# Your browser or browser version is not supported on this website. To successfully utilize this website, please upgrade your browser or browser version.

Processing Failure

To update to the latest Internet Explorer browser, please go to: http://www.microsoft.com/windows/ie/default.asp

To update to the latest Netscape browser, please go to: http://channels.netscape.com/ns/browsers/default.jsp

If you are using a Macintosh or Linux based computer browser, please see the PayXpress FAQs for our current policy in regards to those systems and browsers.

I just moved too, in San Francisco.

The DSL problem is universal, The phone number in the house stayed the same, but there was a different DSL provider (the previous tenant was a professor getting it via Stanford University even though there were SBC hats on the guys installing it). To switch to SBC DSL they had to wait for the Stanford DSL to be disconnected. That order went in on Weds June 30. On July 4 DSL still worked, but then it died. I was told by SBC that I could NOT put in an order till the line a) hd changed into my name (OK) and that the old DSL was completely off the system. That would take 10 business days (over a holiday weekend too!). After about 3 or 4 calls to hurry up the process, I got someone who promised me that it would be on 5 business days later on Friday July 9th, and it actually was!

Oh and I'd tried to order online to get a better rate, but because of the other service being on their database even if not being on the line, they couldnt take the order online. The nice customer service rep gave me the cheaper price though. Finally, set-up of my new account was smooth other than it was working to my satisfaction already when, no matter how much I tried to dissuade him, the service rep stuck to his script of trying to get me to use the SBCYahoo browser. BTW the people at Yahoo know that no one uses that--SBC should dump Yahoo as that connection does them no good at all and costs them a fortune.

PG&E worked fine BUT they had me on record as a possibly ID theft case and made me go down to their office to show ID rather than just do it over the phone. I should apparently have brought a lease/document showing I woned the place too, but they didnt tell me that. The rep told me mana times that she was taking a huge risk turning the account into my name but did it anyway.

Cable (Comcast) is working when I plugged my TV in. I dont want it but when the bill stops getting paid eventually they'll turn it off. Then I'll plus into the Direct TV that the builing has.

No of this holds a candle to the experience I'm having with my health plan paying for surgery i had a few months back. For more on that go over to The Health Care Blog

Want good DSL? Try Speakeasy. They still have to battle with your local provider, but they fight the good fight for you. They put EVERYTHING about your account status online for you to look at. You will know when the line tech submits his reand exactly what he says etc. Its much much better transparency than anyone else has.

whoo boy, could i go on and on about verizon, sbc, covad, speakeasy, and getting dsl installed.

actually, i can. and i did:

http://www.unto.net/unto/meta/verizon.html -- on Verizon
http://www.unto.net/unto/work/dsl.html -- on DSL
http://www.unto.net/unto/work/dsl_2.html -- on DSL, part 2
http://www.unto.net/unto/work/dsl_3.html -- on DSL, part 3

(sorry that MT won't let me link in the comments.) those are the stories of getting a new line installed in san francisco, and getting through the day with an old one in new york city.

all I can say now is good luck -- and blog the misery. it's cathartic. (and may ultimately force the vendors to get their acts together.)

I found the order page!

There's a link to it on the "dtv - digital television->packages and pricing" page, under "Other Services Available."

Intuitive, huh?

I dealt with the same thing when dealing with Charter Communications. One day my cable is working the next my TV and internet are down. I contact the Charter Communications customer service line and they taunt me with a prerecorded message about saving time and looking at the FAQs online. "If I had online access at the time I could..." Anyways, I got the "run around" for serveral phone calls. Finally I was able to convence them to send a rep out. They said it would be 7 days until someone had time.

I called back later that day hoping to speak with someone who had more sympathy. They were able to connect me to manager who put me on the emergency list which meant some rep would come by my house 3 days later without warning and ask to be let in the apartment. They never tell you when they will come by, but you had better take the day off from work if you want to be serviced in under 7 business days. Finally the guy comes and notices that a service rep connecting my new neighbors cable disconnected mine the week before. Wow. Really is that the best we can do? Can I choose another cable company? No, because they have a monopoly on my area. Terrible.

Now Netflix, that is a great company. I do it all online and they even track what I have watched in the past, allow me to rate the movies and even now and again send and HTML email asking me if my movie arrived on time. The best online experience so far. So simple, so easy. And no postage fees and auto billing. That is good customer service.

As a veteran telco-ISP software engineer responsible for architecting systems at a large competitor of Verizon, I can say our customer service isn't much better, due mostly to terrible and almost unavoidable system designs. I doubt any others are any better either. The problems are:

- Large legacy phone company billing systems. Integration with these often mainframe systems is tedious and plagued with problems. The solution is to replace them, but even if it could be justified financially, it isn't going to happen overnight.

- Large legacy sales systems. Same problems. Sure you can build a new one, but with such a large company, there are architectural issues, training issues, even FCC, union and regulatory issues.

- Customer management systems. More of the same.

- Because of internal politics, many departments demand they have their fingers in the pie, resulting the systems being broken into many pieces, often along illogical borders. regulatory issues have a lot to do with this as well. And thanks to varying skill levels in overpopulated IT departments, the systems are tied together haphazardly using all sorts of bad RPC mechanisms.

...and on and on. Net result is a total chaotic mess of different systems managing different resources. Data can easily drop out, causing portions or entire service to not work. I personally do my best to bring order to the chaos, but it's a loosing battle.

I found this link to order cable:

http://www2.twcnyc.com/index2.cfm?c=dtv/form2

I got there by starting at the url you provided, put in my zip code, it complained, then I picked NY, NY as the region and off I went....

Hey Mark, don't forget that as a residential customer, you're of no value to the phone company. Really. The service costs of supporting you are more than the revenue they can get from you; business customers make all the money. For many phone companies, serving Joe Homephone is really just a PR thing. It's just not worth the astronomical costs of fixing things for you for the $50 a month you pay them.

Don't forget the best part about Time Warner. You can't pay your bill online. For those of us w/ TW Cable Modem service (which, shockingly, is actually really good w/ only one, 1 hour unplanned outage in the 3 years I've had it) this means that I can't pay my internet bill on the internet. It's not a huge hassle but it makes me laugh every month when I write the stupid check.

BE

Should you want to check your Verizon email over the web (like when you're on vacation, perhaps overseas) you will now discover that there is no link to the webmail page from the main verizon.com site. They removed it last week. I needed to call customer service in order to find out the url is http://netmail.verizon.net

If I knew how to type faster I would share a rather scary and lengthy story with you all, but let's just cut to the chase and say that I am not a Verizon customer any more.

Customer service (of any quality) is dead.

Andrew
Browser Hijacker Remover
http://spyware.pcwash.com/browser-hijacker.html

I had EXACTLY the same problem wiht Verizon -- turns out they had my number in some division they called "Verizon Avenue." Who knows? It made no sense to me.

I too would recommend dropping Verizon all together, luckily Speakeasy has a new program called One Link, that allows you to avoid having to deal with Verizon. As for cable, I recommend Dishnetwork, you can signup online and as for the ads run by cable companies about always loosing a connection. I've had less downtime with the Dish in 3 years, than I have with cable in one including during the second 1/2 of the Superbowl!

I can beat your Verizon story.

It took Verizon fourteen months to get my business DSL installed. Yes, you read that right: 14 months. Nearly a year and a quarter. And I had Verizon phone service at the DSL install location throughout the entire time. I've heard every excuse in the book, time after time: Wiring fault at CO. Wiring fault at install site. CO issues. D-SLAM capacity issues. CO rerouting (??). Ethernet cable problems. Username/password mismatches. My account hadn't been used in 30 days or more (no sh*t!) so it had been "suspended"; the only remedy being to cancel my install request and generate a brand new one. The MAC address on my DSL modem had changed. I wasn't using an approved operating system (??).

Look people: I know what I'm doing. I've built ISP's and I built and managed an $8m datacenter for a brokerage house.

The plain and simple fact is that: from an internal perspective, Verizon is f*cked. Their disparate business units are totally disfunctional in their communications. Given the incredibly limited amount of information each department has access to/can change (or lack thereof), their systems are probably ancient 3270 apps, and if not ancient 3270 apps they're hastily slapped together DIY Windows GUIs sitting on top of ancient 3270 apps. If they are modern, newly-written systems, then people need to get fired. A lot of people. High-up people. Their customer service policies are there in name only, and lack any form of what I'd call substance. Customer service reps regularly exhibit symptoms of either a) severe lack of training, thoughtfulness or indeed, care or b) outright lies in order to get you off the phone or get you to another department.

The good news is, my DSL was finally installed, and is working beautifully. And through a very fortuitous series of magical yet maddening events, I was able to find out the real reason why my install took so long: the install location doesn't actually have a "real address". It's a long story, but suffice to say the install site is in the middle of public area and isn't what one would call a postal address. From way back in the 70s Verizon and my employer had referred to the site's address as the nearest NYC cross-street. e.g. we'd use 22 5th Ave, if for example the nearest cross-streets were 22nd St and 5th Aves (which they're not). Actually, it was more of a reminder since we already had 10+ Verizon lines working fine at that location, and have had since the early 1970s. From Day 1 of my install process, I informed them of this. I mean - they already knew, right? They bill us every month for them! I constantly reminded them of this. I requested they add notes to the account to that effect. "Yes sir, the note has been added". I can't tell you how many times I heard that. I also can't tell you how many times I heard customer service reps tell me that there were no notes to that effect.

And yet, when the chips fell and everything was finally working -- the reason was that the address issue was finally sorted out. And that was only because my boss happened to know someone shockingly high up at Verizon Online, who I can only assume, asked around on our behalf.

And who am "I" you say? I represent one of NYC's oldest and most prestigious arts organizations. And we also happen to be the lucky recipients of Verizon's many philanthropic efforts, to the tune of lots of dollars per year. Verizon throws parties at our DSL install site from time to time, and have done since they were Bell Atlantic, and even NYNEX. They even had their own DSL lines installed and working (for Verizon Wireless) at the public payphone at our DSL install site -- while they were telling me that my own DSL was impossible.

If this is not a story of a very, very -- shockingly -- f*cked up company, I don't know what is.

This is all true.

Let me tell you, I had a similar experience with Verizon except even worse. I have phone service with Verizon and DSL with Earthlink. One day, Verizon decides it's going to go through it's old accounts of people that had DSL with them and any inactive accounts it's going to terminate. Well, apparently, years before I had the phone number, some company had it and had DSL with Verizon on that line as well. Verizon puts in a terminate order for the 5 year old company and their DSL service.

Earthlink calls me to tell me that Verizon has put in a cancel on my DSL service even though it's Earthlink and not Verizon and that now I have to wait for it to cancel, four weeks in the future, then call Earthlink again to re-sign up for service.

When I call Verizon, they tell me there's no way they can cancel my DSL service on the line. It's Earthlink's problem. I call Earthlink and they say it's Verizon. I wait four weeks, my DSL is cancelled, call back Earthlink to set it up and Verizon tells Earthlink there are no ports left for DSL in my area.

Another month goes by.

At this point I wrote a letter to the President of the company, made specific note of my book that I had written about bad customer service, and threatened to use this situation in my upcoming book.

Strangely, all was fixed in the following week (although 2 months of no internet had occurred by then) and they sent me, as an apology, a crappy digital camera that had obviously been re-gifted three times already.

I hate Verizon.

I'm beginning to wonder if companies don't do anything to fix poor customer service as a strategy. I've seen so many examples. I had a new Motorola cordless phone for a few months when the answering machine stopped working. After quite a while digging around on their website, I finally figured out how to send an e-mail. After a few days, I was given a phone number to call to send in the phone for a replacement. I called the number, found it was disconnected, so I sent an e-mail. I never heard from them again.

It's beginning to seem like a full time job just to deal with customer service.

Anyone else dealing with these problems, or is it just me?

Lisa R. Sulgit
Editor in chief
Journal of Intranet Strategy and Management

mark: good issue, as always

i had no problem at all with verizon dsl -- easy installation, great service, but i recently lived thru the tortures of the damned with wireless issues

sounds simple: i wanted to upgrade my existing phone. (hate the thought, not interested in features, don't care about coolness, but it finally is dead after many years of servoce).

i call verizon ... and guess what, i can get a 2nd phone *free*

hmmmm ... my husband wanted one anyway and the shared minutes family plan is a good deal

so ... long miserable story short ... the first phone arrived immediately ... all alone.

two weeks later, after hours on hold and speaking to innumerable people -- each of whom was a fine human being and very helpful but was apparently unable to make my phone actually arrive, despite saying they could -- the second phone showed up.

my conclusions:

-- the customer service level people have no incentive to rise up and pass along what is broken with the system to people who can make changes: their employment is predicated on people calling in with problems ... they take
the calls, and focus on their eventual retirements and pensions

-- the customer service level people know exactly what is wrong with the system *they answer calls all day* ... but nobody interested in fixing it is asking them

-- the customer service level people are as caught as the customer in not being able to do anything: information is in silos, departments are separated, and things don't work /// "you've reached division X; this division is separate from the other division, it is a separate order, blah, blah, blah"

-- endless rounds of explanations that made sense from the perspective of the convoluted ordering system didn't get me my phone any sooner.

-- my old cell number and now my new one are both ny numbers; but i called in from out of ny ... woe is me ... each and every time i had an extra long miserable process until a human could override the automatic call tracker and get me to someone who handles ny numbers: "we are sorry but we are divided into regions and only someone in the ny region can handle your call ... and you called from outside ny"

that's just the abridged version ... it went on and on and on ... every time i called back, i was told the phone would reach me in 1-2 days, all taken care of ... it went on like that for 2 weeks, 1-2 days at a time

why do i stick with them after this torture? the coverage works, the plan works but, oy ... the experience could be SO much better

After dealing with AT&T yesterday, what stands out most is that these scripted drones are nevertheless inclined to flood you with indecipherable internal jargon.

All I wanted to do was to change my phone number. It took an hour. At one point I had someone call me and say there was a "system error on your account" and they didn't know what was going on because working on it would "push it further into system error." Like I was her manager.

I disagree that apologies are all that important. I say this because, after speaking to 4 different Customer Care Representatives yesterday, I quickly tired of their insincere, servile, time-wasting pleas to forgive them for taking up my valuable time. I wanted them to just get on with it.

It's a pity seeing the state of customer service of large companies is in now. I've worked as a customer service cum support before and I never transferred call to another person unless I'm sure that the other person has the definite solution to a customer's problem.

The case of Verizon Rep 3 should never happen as the Rep 3 should be informed in a brief manner by Rep 2 who the caller is before transferring the call. This is what we call a "warm transfer" (if I still have the terminology right). "Cold transfer" like what all the Reps did was not an option to me back then. Well, I guess things have changed, to become worse.

i loved the article...you forgot the best part though, the huge graphic at the top of the TimeWarnerCable homepage has the tagline:

it is time for a cable company that understands how important your time is

i'll bet the Verizon branding team is kicking themselves that they didn't snatch up that one first...

if you really want to sign-up for basic service using the site it is easy (tongue firmly implanted in cheek):
1. enter zipcode in "what's-in-my-area" box
2. in the left nav mouse over the "dtv-digital television" link. make sure to mouse over the link and not click on it, and don't worry that it says dtv-digital television (trust me)
3. from the pop-up menu select the 14th item "sign me up" (again, trust me, this will lead you closer to signing up for basic cable service).
4. click the standard/basic service radio button and click continue
5. enter your contact info and select the basic service you want
6. wait for your cable to magically turn-on or for customer service rep to contact you

What could be easier? All you have to know is that "what's in my area" means enter zipcode if you want to sign-up for service and that TimeWarnerCable doesn't want to sell you basic cable so of course they have buried basic cable sign-up under digital cable sign-up.

WARNING: This website navigator is a trained professional, please do not try this at home ;)

A bit OT, maybe... One of my pet-peeves is all the snail-mail spam I get (usually credit card apps). I generally take 2 seconds to call the 1-800 number to get removed from a company's mailing list. However, VERIZON had no 1-800 number to call on their "service invitation" letter and when I finally got the number for customer service they said I had to send a physical letter to some place in Farmingdale NY to get removed from their list. 3 different customer reps were equally unhelpful and increasingly rude. Why can't there be an easy "opt-out" requirement for snail-mail spam?