Is Verizon Wireless Making It Harder to Avoid Charges?
As longtime readers know, I think the cellphone industry is one step away from a big-city mugger. Some of its practices are outrageous ripoffs — like how they charge so much for text messages (both the sender and the receiver), even though text messages cost them nothing. Or how the purpose of two-year contract is to sell you an expensive phone cheaply, on the premise that you’ll pay it off over the next 24 months, but once you’ve paid off the phone, your monthly bill doesn’t go down. (Except at T-Mobile.)
Verizon drew criticism for making phones where it was easy to access the Internet accidentally. Verizon Wireless, Atkinson Studios Verizon drew criticism for making phones where it was easy to access the Internet accidentally.
A few months ago, I wrote about Verizon Wireless’s outrageous practice of selling phones whose arrow keys are preprogrammed to connect to the Web. And if you hit one accidentally, you get zapped with a $2 Internet charge, instantly.
After much outcry and even an investigation by the Federal Communications Commission, Verizon Wireless installed a “landing page,” a page on the phone that lets you cancel before you incur the charge. But plenty of people still find those mysterious $2 charges. If you truly never use Internet features, you can call Verizon to request a “data block,” to say, “I just don’t use the Internet on my phone, and I don’t want to run the risk of getting hit with those $2 charges.”
Last month, I heard from a customer service representative who, despite working for Verizon Wireless, is on my side on this issue. He wrote with two alarming internal developments at Verizon that could affect you. C.S.R.’s refers to customer service representatives:
“Effective this past month, all C.S.R.’s were versed on the usage of blocks. A new policy has gone into effect regarding how to handle Escalated Calls regarding data charges. Now, a representative can be reprimanded and even terminated for proactively offering to block any of the following:
* Web Access Blocks
* Data Blocks
* Premium SMS blocking
* Application download blocking
* Vcast Music or Vcast Video download blocks
“Essentially, we are to upsell customers on the $9.99 25 mb/month or $29.99 unlimited packages for customers. Customers are not to be credited for charges unless they ask for the credit. And in cases such as data or premium SMS, where the occurrences may have gone months without the consumer noticing, only an initial credit can be issued.”
http://pogue.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/06/17/is-verizon-wireless-making-it-harder-to-avoid-charges/?src=mvBefore any one complains about the title - I worked at Verizon last year (temp job as a coder and business analyst for the Alltel conversion). There are some really good things about Verizon, their network, etc - but there are also some really crappy things about them.
While I cannot discuss things from meetings I attended and such, I did take many smoke breaks with people who were CSR's.
They complained about 2 things mostly - some customers who were jerks (and they were) and how Verizon treated customers and screwed them over and how they felt bad for them but could not do anything about it.
They could lose customers (individual ones, like you and me) and it was not all bad, we had corp customers. An since people were always switching we would get new customers anyway. Hide details, let them rack up huge charges that cost us little, then cut them a 'break'. In other words, over charge and make charges mystical and hard to understand and then settle for less - which was still more.
*Not* all the time, and I will say I met many people there who busted their asses to make customers happy - but there was a bottom line. The CSR's who cared the most felt like a liability. It was like "We care, just not too much - and mainly when it came to obeying the law and federal regs."
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