Verizon had the opportunity today to invest in a happy and contented long-term customer for $40.

I asked that they credit back $40 worth of disputed fees that arose from me mis-navigating a poorly designed web site.

But no. They’d rather take the chance on me taking my business elsewhere.

But no. They’d rather I telephone their call center and take the salaried and benefit-laden time of one of their customer representatives for any need I have in the future instead of using their web site ever again.

For $40 worth of incorrectly incurred fees, they could have secured a happy long-term customer.

Instead they would rather risk losing $65/month for the next however many years. Instead they would rather discourage usage of their web site and encourage the use of their live call centers, whatever their recorded on-hold messages say to the contrary.

So beware. Any mistake you make on their intentionally misleading web site will be your fault.

So beware. Any fees you inadvertently incur by trusting the misleading online instructions are your responsibility to notice and notify them about before a billing cycle passes its arbitrary mid-month date.

No one at Verizon can help you. No one at Verizon has the authority to do anything after a billing cycle has passed.

No one at Verizon has it in their job description to improve the system, or to receive a suggestion, or to care about the systemic craziness of spending thousands of dollars on salaries to do what a well-designed web site could accomplish, or to spend $40 once in order to continue receiving $65/month indefinitely.

I have some thinking to do about what I am going to do now that I know that Verizon has a sub-line of services making money on the errors of their customers.

Last I heard, your customers were your clients, not your victims.

Verizon seems to be making money, though. Maybe we should all try to cheat our customers at every turn and blame them for the privilege.

I think I’m done with my venting.

As for you, though. Beware.

This entry was posted on Monday, November 7th, 2011 at 4:25 pm and is filed under Musings. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.