Skip to main content

IVR Hell #1: Verizon

I have the Verizon FIOS service.

The complete package of fast Internet, cable television and land line phone service. Overall it has been fine. The installers did a nice job, everything works, and outages have been infrequent.

At the start of the college football season, I called the 888 number on the screen to get the ESPN Gameplan football package which includes eight or so additional college games each weekend. It took about thirty minutes of various IVR menus and holding periods before I reached a human. She promptly asked, and I would add not too courteously, what problem I was having with my phone.

That question was so unanticipated that I actually laughed out loud, before letting her know I wanted to spend money with Verizon.

After some unnecessarily long time gaps, the service was established, and we enjoyed a game that very evening.

However, when the following Saturday rolled around, the Gameplan stations announced that I wasn't a subscriber to those channels. So, back to the phones, back through IVR menus, etc, etc. for another thirty minutes, discussion with a human, service re-established.

Here at the fifth week of the season, we have had to call four weeks. Pam holds the record; she was on hold/in IVR hell for two hours before she got service fixed.

Perhaps since college football is a bigger deal in the South and Midwest than the Northeast, not that many people sign up....

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Stimulus Plan

Mr. President: The House stimulus bill is awful. Dangerous. Counter-productive. It has a very high probability of making things worse!. Your man Rahm Emanuel is supposed to be a tough guy: turn him loose on the House Dems - they are selling you down the river. Some simple tests: the spending will improve long-term productivity; the spending will reduce our dependence on foreign oil, and the spending will happen fast; very, very fast. There may need to be some legislation to enable spending without years of environmental review. For example, spending on wind farms would improve long-run productivity and reduce dependence on foreign oil. But let's say the wind farm is a couple of miles offshore. You can't have environmental groups stopping the development to see if some fish will be harmed. This spending has to happen now. And, no tax cuts with the possible exception of AMT. People aren't going to spend any tax savings; they are going to pay their credit card bills or r...

Book Review: What Matters Now by Gary Hamel

Interview of Eric Schmidt by Gary Hamel at the MLab dinner tonight. Google's Marissa Mayer and Hal Varian also joined the open dialog about Google's culture and management style, from chaos to arrogance. The video just went up on YouTube. It's quite entertaining. (Photo credit: Wikipedia ) Cover of The Future of Management My list of must-read business writers continues to expand.   Gary Hamel , however, author of What Matters Now , with the very long subtitle of How to Win in a World of Relentless Change, Ferocious Competition, and Unstoppable Innovation , has been on the list for quite some time.   Continuing his thesis on the need for a new approach to management introduced in his prior book The Future of Management , Hamel calls for a complete rethinking of how enterprises are run. Fundamental to his recommendation is that the practice of management is ossified in a command and control system that is now generations old and needs to be replaced with somethi...

The Reasons We Think America is On the Wrong Course

I was listening to the Michael Medved show yesterday. He does a nice job at talk radio. But he was worked up because the CBS News Poll showed that 72% of Americans surveyed think the U.S. is on the wrong track. (When I went to CBS' site, it looks to me like the number is 69%, but that's an insignicant difference). Medved's view is that income for the poorest citizens are rising (recent government data), unemployment is low, stock market is high, no cold war, so why so pessimistic? Here are my answers: Several of our young men and women are being killed every day in a war that we are getting sick of. The deficit is some unimaginable, staggering number that my generation is imposing on my children. Social Security is bankrupt and both Congress and the Administration (both previous and current, and both Republican and Democratic) are unwilling to face the issue. There are virulent infectious agents in hospitals that are resistent to essentially all antibiotics, and the drug co...