Verizon Tells Cops "Your Money Or Your Life"

Mike writes "A 62-year-old man had a mental breakdown and ran off after grabbing several bottles of pills from his house. The cops asked Verizon to help trace the man using his cellphone, but Verizon refused, saying that they couldn't turn on his phone because he had an unpaid bill for $20. After an 11-hour search (during which time the sheriff's department was trying to figure out how to pay the bill), the man was found, unconscious. 'I was more concerned for the person's life,' Sheriff Dale Williams said. 'It would have been nice if Verizon would have turned on his phone for five or 10 minutes, just long enough to try and find the guy. But they would only turn it on if we agreed to pay $20 of the unpaid bill.' Score another win for the Verizon Customer Service team."

Comments

Simple solution

[Shadow of Eternity]

Any time something like this happens everyone from the first manager with the authority to do something that refuses all the way up the chain gets held responsible for whatever happens as a result of their refusal to act.

Guy dies, they get held responsible for murder because they chose to not assist the police knowing full well that their actions would cause the death of another human being.

Never going to happen.

Punishing an employee for obeying corporate policy

[qbzzt]

Remember, a corporation is a "legal person" so you can't punish an employee for obeying the will of the company.

No. The corporation's status as a legal person protects share holders. It does not protect employees of the corporation. If I charter the "Mafia Collection Agency" corporation and hire assassins, they can still be punished for murder.

In this particular case, an employee that receives the request from law enforcement has three possible actions:

1. Help, turn the phone on.
2. Ignore or delay the request.
3. Escalate to a supervisor.

#1 may or may not be possible to a customer support representative. #3 is an acceptable action.

The highest level that got a documented request and ignored it should be criminally liable. After a few mid level managers go to jail, nobody would be willing to ignore this type of request. Managers would make sure the CYA and send this up the chain until it got to somebody with common sense.

Re:How do you punish a corporation?

[BriggsBU]

Allow me to preface my comments here by saying I've worked for Verizon Wireless customer service.

Now that that's out of the way, Verizon Wireless DOES have policies outlined in their "Methods and Procedures" (documents telling agents what to do in X situation) for this circumstance. In fact, when an agent receives a call from someone stating they are a police officer that agent is required to immediately transfer the call (cold transfer, IE: agent transfers and doesn't introduce the officer to the other line) to a special department that is under VZW's legal department (same speed dial number). I've actually had a call similar to this. I don't know if the account was suspended for non-payment, but I received a call from a police officer needing to locate an individual that had been reported missing.

I warm transferred the call (I was honestly nervous as hell because I knew someone's life could be in danger). Instead of just transferring the call, I stayed on the line until I got the agent from that department on the line.

According to the M&Ps, those agents are supposed to do ANYTHING to assist the police in locating a missing person. If that means reconnecting the line, they are supposed to do that.

What this sounds like is that the agent who received the call didn't know that they were supposed to transfer the call to that specialty team and instead tried to handle it themselves. That agent will probably be out of a job very shortly.

So no, this wasn't something that happened because of a corporate policy, this is something that happened because the agent who received the call didn't know what to do and didn't properly follow the corporate policy.