Will's Thoughtstream

My mom moved about a month ago, and signed up with Verizon DSL in her new house. I first learned she was having problems with her Internet service when I emailed her a movie I made on JumpCut, and she wasn't able to view it. It turns out that Verizon gave her a DSL line that had less than 56kbps speeds. Yes, that's right - Verizon was charging her DSL prices for less than dialup speeds.

• Verizon Mistake #1: If you aren't providing the product or service you promised, don't charge the customer. Verizon certainly could have monitored the quality of the connection and measured the transmission rate and determined that they were never delivering on the promised broadband connectivity. Therefore, they shouldn't have charged for it. This wasn't merely a case of "results may vary" - Verizon agreed that the speeds were excessively slow.

After several frustrating customer service calls with Verizon trying to resolve the speed issue (including one marothon session that went on for several hours), she gave up, and decided to get a broadband cable modem instead.

• Verizon Mistake #2: Verizon shouldn't have allowed several support calls to go by without resolving the issue. If it wasn't resolve, Verizon support should have escalated the issue on behalf of the customer to get it resolved. Once the customer has identified a problem, and said that the problem isn't fixed, Verizon should not put the burden of following up on the issue on the customer. That's Verizon's responsibility to the customer. They should have kept working on the issue until they got it fixed, and (to go back to mistake #1), not charged for the service until it was working correctly.

After my mom got her cable broadband connected, she called Verizon back to cancel her DSL service. Verizon told her that when she moved she was automatically entered into a new one year contract with DSL, and therefore there would be an early termination fee of $79 to cancel her contract. They were insistent that she would have to pay the fee even though she had complained many times about the lack of service and spent hours with technical support.

• Verizon Mistake #3: Don't charge an early termination fee unless it really is to recoup a cost of a discount product. It's not like she was getting a new cell phone. Verizon flipped a few bits to turn on her DSL service (or not, as the case may be). What's the early termination fee for? In this case, it is just another way to extract money from the customer without delivering any value. As customers, we may not like cell phone contracts, but at least we can understand that the early termination fee for a cell phone contract is an attempt to recoup the cost of the discounted phone. There was no lost cost to recoup for the DSL line. And especially don't charge an early termination fee for a customer who is leaving because of technical problems.

My mom was very unsatisfied with Verizon's response, so she asked to be escalated to 2nd level support. The 2nd level support agent reiterated the early termination fee contract clause. So my mom cited the poor service she had received. The many hours spent on the phone with Verizon technical support. The lack of anything approaching DSL speeds. The support agent claimed that Verizon had no record of the calls because they were handled by a different department. He also claimed that the technical support department should have referred my mother to a different department to have the DSL speed issues addressed.

• Verizon Mistake #4: Keep track of what happens to your customers. There's nothing more frustrating than explaining something over and over ahead. For goodness sake, this is what enterprise databases and CRM software is for. If you don't know what your customers are calling about, how the heck can you ever address their concerns or improve your services? 
• Verizon Mistake #5: Don't shift the responsibility onto the customer. The customer doesn't care which department owns what issues. That's Verizon's responsibility to address. If you can't empower someone to fix the issue, then at least make sure that one person can talk to another person so the issue can get fixed without shuffling your customer around.
• Verizon Mistake #6: The customer is always right. Verizon didn't deliver the service they promised, they didn't resolve the problem when asked to, and now the customer wants out. Verizon should be doing anything possible to appease this customer.

Since my mom was still adamant that she wasn't going to pay a $79 termination fee she asked to speak to the 2nd level support's manager. He responded that there was no further escalation, that he was the top of the support chain. My mom asked him if he was claiming to be the CEO of Verizon.

• Verizon Mistake #7: Don't lie and claim there is no further support. I don't know if this is something that happens as a result of policy at companies (i.e. a policy to resist escalation), or if it is something that agents do to avoid bad feedback on their handling of the case, but there is always a path for escalation. It is absurb to believe that there is no further path for escalation.

The end result? Verizon received their $79 early termination fee, but they lost my mother as a ongoing customer. She's now looking into alternatives to Verizon for her telephone service, of which there are many, of course. In an age with so many alternatives for telephone service you want, companies like Verizon should do anything within their power to keep their customers. Especially a customer like my mom, who would normally never change her telephone service provider, never move again for ten years, and never pay a bill late. My mom is the ideal long term, low cost, high revenue customer. But through exceptionally bad customer service, Verizon has permanently lost her as a customer.

• Verizon Mistake #8: Every mom out there has a son who blogs and will gladly tell the story of the bad customer service their mom received at the hands of Verizon. The risk and exposure associated with bad customer service is only going up. Not only does Verizon risk losing their customer to the growing number of phone service alternatives out there, they risk losing many other prospective customers who hear the bad customer service stories.

I think these kinds of mistakes are not unique to Verizon. Every company that wants to retain their customers and get new ones needs to look at customer support to systematically address these kind of customer service mistakes. Many companies are looking at ways to take the cost out of customer support. Doing that by reducing the quality and effectiveness of support does reduce costs, but only at the sacrifice of future revenue from lost customers. The real trick to reduce customer support costs is to reduce the need for support by (a) improving the quality of the product, (b) automatically detecting and fixing problems - my mom's problem would have been an excellent candidate for this, and (c) having highly effective and usable self-support options that customers prefer to use. If the customer has gone through all of those, and they still have problems, then you're out of the realm of reducing support costs and into the realm of trying to retain your customer. And that shouldn't be done with a cost-reducing approach.