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Verizon Rejected iPhone Deal
SnowDog74 writes "According to an article in USA Today, Verizon Wireless rejected an Apple deal over the iPhone. The article says that Verizon wasn't happy with the strict terms Apple demanded — a Verizon Wireless VP is quoted saying that Apple wanted a cut of monthly revenues and control of the customer relationship. What's perhaps equally interesting, however, is the implication from sources that say Cingular's exclusive 5-year deal with Apple applies within the United States only. If this is true, it undermines some of the criticism Apple has been receiving for their business strategy surrounding the iPhone, given the size of the cell-phone market outside the US."
Customer service numbers? They might pride themselves on those numbers, but they are as full of crap as their systems. I'm sorry, any company who has a known issue of the IVR dropping options off of peoples accounts for years, that then decides to not fix the IVR system is not what I would call customer-oriented.
Or how about the fact that they care so much about their customers that they require their call reps to handle anything non-call related in their spare moments between making call quotas? You know, those little things like recalculating bills that have gone awry (see IVR) or filing the paperwork...
My wife worked for Verizon, the only thing they care less about then their customers is their computer systems - except for th mice, those have to be installed by an expert technician. Probably not the same one that installed the fully tested software update that took down your entire department yesterday, cannot be backed out of, and is costing you your paycheck (if your not answering phones, your not earning...)
Yep, customers are number one, provided you qualify that statement as "after everythig else but the computer systems..."
Whee signature.
As a retailer, I found their policies to err on the side of customer benefit.
Ermm... I had 4 lines on a family plan...We were all happily using our 1800 minutes or whatever, and i was paying 170 or 180 a month. One month, there was a crisis in the family, and the total of calls was quite a bit in excess of our minutes, to the point that my bill was $680... I called customer service and explained the situation, and they said they'ed forward that along with a backdated request to up my minute allotment since i never went over and always paid on time... They said that this was a situation they've had before and that was usually the way that it was remedied... a few days later, i got a call from them that said that billing had determined that it "wasn't in the customers best interest" to do so...
Now, if they had said "sorry, but there's nothing we can do about it" that'd have been one thing... But they said "there is something we do about that" and then turned around and decided NOT to... That has made me one unhappy verizon customer... Of course, I'm sticking with them because my contracts up in June, and guess what comes out then on another network?
So no... I can't see how verizon is a customer service oriented carrier... everything with them is like pulling teeth...