How can I chat with a verizon rep?

For a Communications Technology company why is Verizon support so lacking when it comes to communicating with their customers?

• This is honestly a source of confusion, not just a gripe! Case in point.  Sometime between 10pm Sunday Evening and 4:45am Monday morning our FIOS Internet, Phone, and Television all went off-line.  Since there was a storm over the weekend, I suspected there was some general area outage.  When I arrived at my office I logged in to the VZ web-site. I then spent ~5 – 10 minutes searching for * A web-page that listed general service outages - Unsuccessful * A web-page where I could report a service outage - Unsuccessful I did not want to take up time on the phone, so I elected to start up an on-line chat with a Support rep.   Note: when initiating a support thread, you can identify your problem as Voice, Internet, or TV – there is no option for indicating that everything is out of service. That commenced a 40 minute chat session, during which the rep attempted to reboot my home setup (Unsuccessfully)  and which was punctuated by several lengthy gaps, where the Rep was on hold with other branches of Verizon support.  Conclusion of call:    Verizon would need to send out a tech to my home, next appointment was sometime between 8am – 5pm…in three days. Flash forward ~ 60 minutes later.. my wife walking home from our children’s’ school notices a Verizon truck parked up our street.   She asks the Tech what’s going on and in 30 seconds finds out there is a downed wire that took out service for the entire block.  They were working on a replacement, it should be taken care of by 8pm at the latest. Given that every FIOS Customer is a node on a Verizon network, detecting outages like this should be easy, and fairly instantaneous.  Automating an application to post an outage to a web-page likewise.  Giving tech’s the ability to post updates, via something like a mobile Text Message, also easy. It is easy to lay this at the feet of the inefficiencies associated with quasi-monopolistic companies.  However there are other quasi-monopolies that seem to do a much better job with providing this type of service.   PSE&G, for example, has done a far better job communicating outages over a variety of media, including web, e-mail, and Twitter.  You can also schedule an automated call-back, if you call them at a time when there are long queues for their phone support. Why is it that Verizon would sooner maintain an organization that results in 40 minutes of wasted phone/chat support time, rather than something that could be: * More informative * Provide better customer service * And be essentially free to build and maintain?

• Answer:

  I believe that the problem for very large corporations is lack of focus and ownership. This is most likely reinforced by their corporate structure. A company like Verizon has a vice-president of customer service, with his own organization and a, let's call it, new media vice-president, who has a smaller organization. The latter can run things in an almost startup fashion: creating new content, engaging customers in a new way, etc. But s/he has to contract her/his customer service with the customer service organization. S/He has to pay them, train them and (worst of all) s/he has to use their outdated systems to provide support. Things get complicated very quickly and the new group can no longer work as efficiently as they should. For example: Someone like you offers an excellent suggestion for the web site (add the option of a full or partial outage), but now their IT vendor needs to be involved and development needs to be contracted and paid for. The vendor, of course, is so large that this small change is not a top priority, so they tell the VP that it'll take six months to do it. The new media VP can escalate the issue, but one can only pull so many favors and they have to be for really big things, so they wait for 6 months. Half a year later the stock is under pressure and all VPs get orders to cut costs. This change is a small item in the budget and it's better than losing 10 employees, so it is shelved. Two weeks later the VP receives an order to increase revenue, no matter what the cost, so there is new money to complete the project, but now the costumer service organization is on strike and the reps cannot be trained in the new functionality, etc, etc... This may be a bit extreme, but it is an example of the problems large corporations have focusing on their customers and their needs. Very few companies manage to stay in touch with their customers after growing beyond certain size, but even fewer keep that focus after some time. You have to remember that MaBell is over 100 years old and Verizon and AT&T are very lethargic and too large to care about their individual customers. The good news (for them) is that they are competing against cable companies, that act like they never really cared about their customers. To be fair, this is not just a Telecommunications problem, it is a corporate culture problem (in my view at least). But these companies are poster children for it.