Our trouble with Verizon services began when our Fios line was cut in early May, causing an outage of services. Beginning with our first call for service and ending with our final (I hope) termination phone call, we received deplorable customer service. Once a temporary line was installed outside, an order to have it buried was never placed, leading our line to be cut several times. It would often take thirty to forty minutes to schedule service calls. Reconnection seemed to take longer with each tech visit, one visit taking over five hours for restoration of only partial services. Services would be restored only partially, maybe the On Demand and Guide functions would be available on only one of our two boxes or the Internet Router would not work. After struggling with the lack of collaboration and communication between Verizon techs and support staff for four weeks, we were left with little option but to discontinue services.
We first contacted Verizon in early June to terminate our contract. We made a total of four contacts to Verizon requesting termination of services. During each call, we were specifically told that our services had been discontinued and our early termination fee was waived due to the evident errors that occurred with our account. We contacted Verizon Customer Service on 7/22/13 after we noticed, again, that we had not received an e-mail or packages in the mail to return our equipment. We were told by the representative with whom we spoke that our services had in fact not been terminated up to that point. We were again given an order number for termination (the last two we were given could not be found in the system) and told our termination fee would in fact not be waived as no one had passed away or participated in military service. We were not directed to a supervisor or complaint department. There was no explanation for why our multiple attempts at termination failed, why the representative we spoke to throughout the months of June and July provided us with false information and no reason behind the false termination order numbers we received.
What started as a routine problem escalated to a termination of services. A termination of services escalated to a two month long ordeal, requiring multiple phone calls filled with repetitive conversations. We can only assume these problem arose as the result of poorly trained staff, lack of oversight and poor communication.