GTE may have changed their name to Verizon but they still have the same really bad customer service. They could give Verio a run for the money when it comes to having the least helpful, most incompetent customer service.

Several months ago I made the mistake of calling Verizon and asking if I could possibly get DSL service. They said it wasn’t available in my area and I thought that was the end of the matter. But Verizon decided to bill me for DSL even though I can’t have it. So I’ve spent several hours on the phone with them since then trying to get the bogus DSL charges removed from my bill. Every month when a new phone bill arrives it turns out that not only have they not fixed the problem, they’ve added a new month of charges.

The general process you go through in a case like this is to call the phone number provided on the phone bill for billing problems and explain the problem (even when you ask them to, they never keep a record of any previous calls, so you always have to start from scratch). Next the billing office will tell you that you have to talk to the Internet office. The Internet office will tell you to call the DSL office. The DSL office will say they can’t get involved in billing problems, they only handle DSL problems. Sometimes if you complain enough and sound angry enough, they forward you to a supervisor who makes up some whacky explanation for the how to get DSL charges off your bill.

These whacky explanations will be different each time you call and, of course, none of them work. Today’s supervisor insisted that I had to get someone in the DSL department to send an email to the accounting department requesting that the non-existent DSL service be removed from the bill. This was because, they said, the accounting department isn’t allowed to correct billing problems discovered by customers, but will instantly fix billing problems discovered by other internal Verizon departments. Yeah right. last months solution involved setting up a three or four person conference call with representatives from all three departments because they had to all simulaneously fix the problem. At one point it was even suggested that the easiest solution would be to “just pay the bill since it wasn’t very much”. I can hardly wait to see what they come up with next month.