Mark’s progress: Manchester, TN

Mark spoke to me from Manchester, TN this evening.  He said he has finally gotten into cold weather.  I asked him if he had any stories to report and he said that at one point today, traffic was so packed together that the trailer of a semi bumped and scratched the housing for one of his side mirrors.  That’s pretty tight!

Mark has been driving short days up until now, but it just occurred to him that if he continues at the pace he’s been going, he won’t arrive in Elkhart, IN until the weekend and he’s afraid the RV supply place he wants to set up a business account with might not be open.  So tomorrow he has to drive through two and a half states before he settles down for the night.  Please be praying for safe travels for him.


Meanwhile, back at the ranch…

You may recall that on March 4th, I posted a chat I had with Verizon regarding their billing for our stolen tablet.  I had chatted one day with one representative, the next day with another, and then I had asked to speak with a supervisor.  The chat I had with the supervisor, Mitchell, was not only unproductive, but it got ugly real fast.  I then asked to speak with someone above him and he said he’d have someone higher up call me the next night.  I never received a phone call.  My younger sister, Lauryn, sent me a link to a page on Verizon’s website where one could request mediation, and I filled out that form and sent it in, but again there was no response.  Sunday night of this week, I finally contacted the Better Business Bureau (BBB) with my complaint.

Monday morning, while I was at work, someone from Verizon called Mom and said he had received my complaint from the BBB and he wanted me to call him so we could discuss it.  I tried yesterday and got his voice mail, and I left a message for him to call me at work, but I didn’t get a call back.  This morning, I tried again and got hold of Ahmed.

I was very impressed with him.  He said he had had an opportunity to listen to the recording of my initial phone call when I reported our tablet stolen, and he said that he could detect that the representative wasn’t fully engaged with me.  The representative never offered me the reduced data plan which he should have, and as a result, Ahmed spoke with the representative’s supervisor and told him to give the representative more training on how to deal with reports of stolen devices.  Ahmed also said that he was going to give me the retroactive lower plan that I’ve been asking for, and furthermore, he said that even though my contract on the tablet isn’t up till April 1st, he is going to cancel it immediately with no penalty to me.  I told him that when I paid my bill earlier this month, I left $80 off due to this issue and he said he will be giving me a $90 credit which will wipe that out and still leave me $10 credit on our next bill.

Then he asked if there was anything else he could do.  I said that I have been thinking about canceling my hot spot because Verizon doesn’t have a tower in Ellison Bay and so data devices don’t work very well there.  He offered to cancel it on the spot for me, and he asked if there was anything else I needed.

I told him about the chat I’d had with Mitchell where I had felt accused and threatened.  Ahmed found the chat and said he’d read through it and contact Mitchell’s supervisor to train him on better customer service too.

I told Ahmed that he had just saved his company’s bacon.  I said I had been on the verge of canceling all my Verizon accounts, but after he heard me and gave me the compensation I was asking for, I think we will keep our landline which we know will work in Ellison Bay.  He said he was happy that he’d been able to help and that I had decided to keep our landline.

The moral of the story is this:  If you are unhappy with the service you have received and you’ve tried to resolve it at lower levels to no avail, the BBB gets immediate results.  It pays to stick to your guns!

The other thing to note about this experience is that not everyone at Verizon is a jerk.  I am a reasonable person if I feel I am being heard and am able to get results.  I am grateful that Ahmed was at a level to be able to resolve the issue, and I am even more grateful that he said measures were being taken to retrain the employees who mishandled their jobs.  With this update, I leave it to my readers who got a negative impression of Verizon from my last report to decide for yourself if you want to use Verizon in the future.  It’s not all bad!

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