Oh, Verizon

Just the other day at the Baltimore Business Journal's Best Places to Work Luncheon, I ran into a colleague who had recently moved. He had a horror story about Verizon. Just like many other people I have spoken to, and consistent with my own experience, Verizon delayed the connection of his new service, left him without service, and forced him to make literally more than a dozen calls to their customer service center.

Verizon suffers from the basic inability to pretend they care that you don't have service (See, if you don't care, at least fake it. Sometimes they give you a lackluster "I'm sorry". Verizon regularly violates rule number one of addressing customer complaints, "Be accessible to your customers". When people have to wait 30 minutes to speak to someone, they are in a bad mood and are less likely to purchase from you again, even before you have a chance to resolve their issue! Customers expect things to go wrong, so if you handle that first call well you can keep them, or even make them think better of you because you were able to be so helpful.

Unfortunately, over 30 percent of customers don't get things resolved in the first call. And if you are a Verizon customer, you might never get things resolved. I didn't, and now I'm with Cavalier.