Is Verizon’s aggressive sales techniques and terrible support due to recent churn increase?

AT&T and Verizon warn investors of higher Q4 churn as Sprint and T-Mobile increase competition

My family has been a customer for a very, very long time, going back to 2002 at least (although your records only indicate 2009). I had my own mobile software porting company and so I was also a business customer porting mobile applications for all the Brew devices!

And so I am truly disappointed in my recent experience with Verizon. I am used to receiving excellent service and support both at the VZW stores and from the customer service, but it appears that things have really changed!

The aggressive sales techniques followed by extremely poor service are, as I said, very disappointing.

On 2/23/2105 I was at the North County fair in Rancho Bernardo, where I was getting a new iPhone 5 for my son at the Apple store to replace the phone that he damaged. I particularly wanted to do that because he was grand-fathered into the unlimited data plan for the last couple of years and I didn’t want to loose that!

I walked over to the Verizon kiosk at that mall with the new phone to replace the old phone, and the sales agent basically sold me on a new plan saying that he can give all of us  a new phone (ours were just fine, my husband’s and mine) and lower our monthly bill to below $300/month (which I was asking him about as well). He also told me that the unlimited data plans were going to be discontinued so it would make sense to do this switch. He assured me that based on my son’s previous data use for the last couple of months, we would not go over the plan data, which was critical.

So I asked him a few times about this, and he swore to me that everything would be ok.

I returned the phone I bought from Apple to the store, and went ahead and changed our plan, got new phones, etc.

Few days later, I started getting alerts that we were going to go over our allowed data plan! So on March 7th (within the 14 day window) I called VZW service to complain, explained what happened at the VZW kiosk, and asked to have the situation resolved. The service rep said he would try to put my son back on the unlimited plan, but that may take time, and in the meantime he would put me on some other plan, with more data.

I was also promised that my monthly bill would be right around or below the $300/month.

Last week, on 4/3/15, I checked to see our bill, and it was over $400!!! I called your service center yet again, and was told that there was a mistake, and that I would get a $111.95 credit. Today, still NO credit, so I call back. I end up speaking with a supervisor from your Tempa office (Kimmie – would not give me a last name!) and she told me basically that I’m screwed! The $111.95 credit was denied for some reason (although no one called me to tell me), she basically said my new monthly bill would be about $330 plus taxes (so more than it ever used to be) and that it was my problem for choosing the upgrade at the kiosk and not reading the terms and conditions, and that because I was more than 14 days after my warranty I could do nothing more (even though I pointed out to her that I did call within the 14 days, and was told that another change in my plans would fix the data overage problem!). I was additionally asked right away to return my old phones, so I didn’t even have a way to go back to using my old phones. I was also told that I could not get the unlimited plan back for my son, because I upgraded, even though I explained to her that I had the new phone from the Apple store in hand when your eager sales agnet told me he could do better! I even explained to her that since VZW was trying to resolve this problem since March 7th, it shows that VZW took responsibility for this problem, and to now turn it around and make it like it’s all me, is really bad form, and puts me in a no win situation.

I feel that I’m the one being penalized for doing the initial transaction where the Verizon sales agent sold me on this new plan idea. Additionally, the service people seem incapable of really solving my problem, and every time I called I got another promise which turned out to be unfulfilled!

 

Poland, the hidden secret for business opportunities!

Last week I attended an event held by the San Diego World Trade Center that was put on by Metrix Inc. representing a Polish technology company EC Systems.

Of course the information that was presented was not news to me, because I have been traveling there just about annually for the past few years, and have seen this first hand. And by this I mean the economic growth, the logos of many large technology companies on buildings in cities such as Warsaw, Cracow, and near my home town, Katowice, hearing American business people talking at the local airports, and just feeling the overall positive atmosphere that is impossible to miss when you’re walking around the shopping centers and town squares and seeing people rushing about with purpose and heads held high, and often with full bags of stuff.

At the event, however, I got to actually see this through the very powerful presentation compiled by Metrix and also by hearing what EC Systems CEO, Mr. Tomash Barszcz had to say about the growth of his company, the expansion into a group of technology companies that are able to deliver technology products from software, to sensors, to electronics and other tech. equipment!  I was very proud! It was truly heart warming to see one of my countrymen speak about his success!

I encourage you to review the presentation which I was allowed to share here to see this first hand:

Metrix wtc 20 sep2011

So, if you or anyone in your company has ever considered moving any of your operations, and thought about Russia, Ukraine, China or India, you may want to consider Poland instead!!

What is Google up to now?

Although I have been involved in mobile area now for almost 10 years, I still try to keep up with what is happening in the software development world in general. For that reason, I have been helping the San Diego chapter of the Google Technology Users Group and last week we had our re-start kick-off meeting which focused on Google’s App Engine.

We had quite a turn out that included engineers, students, entrepreneurs and VC’s! The room at Cooley was packed. The presenter was Chris Schalk, Google’s Developer Advocate in this area, and he gave an overview presentation on App Engine’s various API’s and coding methods. As Cloud computing is growing in popularity, and Software as a Service is now mainstream, Google is now moving into what they call PAAS – Platform as a Service (not to be confused with IAAS – Infrastructure as a Service), where you can do application prototyping and development in the cloud. I was most fascinated by the Prediction API included in the App Engine which allows developers to tap into Google’s machine learning algorithms to analyze historic business data and predict likely future outcomes.

Another interesting point is that in order to appeal to enterprise developers, Google’s storage and service has been SAS 70 certified! This means that they are in compliance with various standards that ensure safety of user data.

Company Names…

Ok, so this may be a bit off-topic, but you may be wondering about the names of my two companies, so here are the answers.

Zaxis – this is a bit “geeky”. It’s from Star Trek, The Wrath of Khan. When Kirk is pursuing Khan in the nebula, Spock points out that Khan, although very intelligent, has two-dimensional thinking. Kirk responds by diving down the Z-axis and comes back around to give Khan his final blow! Basically it implies 3-dimensional thinking, which I felt was a good description of our team!

Virago – Some people think it’s not English, but it is. It has a variety of meanings, some more favorable than others, and I stick with the favorable: a woman of great stature, strength, and courage.  There was a British Royal Navy had 4 ship called HMS Virago, and if it’s good enough for the British Navy, it’s good enough for me!