Dealing with the airline cellphone industry

So a week or so ago Verizon Wireless sent me a postcard to tell me that if I renewed my contract with them, they'd give me a month's free service. I was already aware that my VZW contract was up, and with all the iPhone hype, I'd already been feeling a little nerdish technoenvy and looking at new phones for a possible upgrade. I wasn't contemplating shelling out $600 for an iPhone and certainly not contemplating switching to AT&T, but my old LG VX-8100, which seemed so fancy in 2005, was feeling thick and old (plus I'd lost the back cover), so when I read the magic phrase "This will not affect your eligibility to upgrade phones" on the renewal postcard, I thought, sweet! let's go get a new phone.

Verizon takes a customer they already had in the bag (me, someone who was going to upgrade phones anyway) and makes him even happier (by giving me a month free). Good deal, right?

So I take myself out to Verizon's Beavercreek store. When I get there, I'm greeted by a friendly associate who asks me to register on one of their fancy kiosks. This system is supposedly an improvement on their old system, where there were separate lines for sales, customer service and technical support. With the new system, tech support associates, off on one end of the store, can help sales customers if there aren't any people waiting for tech support. Nonetheless, with it being the day after a holiday, there were tons of people in the store, and I had to wait, almost 30 minutes.

Still, not the end of the world, as it gives me a chance to take a look at the various phones that are available. I was already pretty sure which phone I wanted, but I did take another look at various Windows Mobile phones (my friend Jim has a Palm Treo) to confirm that they're much bigger (too wide) than I want to carry around. The LG VX-8500's are cute, especially in white or cherry chocolate, but I really prefer a flip phone to a slider, and I had my eye on a newer phone that has a 2-megapixel camera with autofocus, namely the MOTORAZR maxx Ve.

Now I'm either a tech sales person's dream customer or nightmare. Perhaps I'm a nightmare because I know what I want and thus he has little chance of selling me a bunch of extras. But I like to think I'm a dream because I know what I want and thus am an easy sale. Last year when I came to this same store to buy a Kyocera KPC650 broadband wireless card, I was in and out of the store in less than 20 minutes. So this time when my name is finally called, I figured, cool, this won't take long now.

I walk up to the counter, and an associate named Jon greets me and asks how he can help me. I tell him I want to renew my contract and upgrade to a new phone, and I hand him the promotional postcard VZW sent me. He looks at it for a minute and then tells me, sorry, I can't do both in the same billing cycle. If I upgrade my phone now and renew my contract now, I won't get the free month. I can renew my contract and come back next month to upgrade phones.

Not good! Why on earth should I have to drive out to Beavercreek and wait in line two times? I pointed out to Jon the phrasing on the card that said that renewing my contract would not affect my ability to upgrade phones and asked him where it said I couldn't do both at the same time. He admitted that it didn't say that but said that's how it was. I said if the card had said that I would have simply called to renew my contract and then come in the next month to upgrade, but it didn't say that and I was already there. Poor Jon acted utterly helpless as if there was not a thing he could do to help me, so I asked to see his manager.

Of course this entailed waiting for another 10-15 minutes, which gave me plenty of time to notice a big poster on the wall behind Jon's counter. That poster lists all the reasons why Verizon Wireless is better than its competition, and one of the reasons is that "If you ever have a problem, it becomes our problem the first time you call." Jon apparently has never seen that poster. I had a problem, and Jon didn't make it his problem. If he'd has his way, it would still have been my problem. Fuck you very much, Jon, but it is in fact your problem, and if you don't want it to be your problem, get a job in another field.

Jon finally did come back and was pleased to report that his supervisor thought that I could in fact renew my contract, getting the month's free service, and at the same time upgrade to a new phone. Jon explained that if, for some reason, I did not receive the credit, I could call his supervisor next month, and he'd fix it. Jon worked on his computer for a while, trying to achieve the impossible, and after another 5 minutes or so had to excuse himself to confer with his superior again. After yet another 10-15 minutes, Jon came back and was able to work the miracle. He gave me my new phone, thanked me for my business and was ready to send me on my merry way. Not so fast, Jon! What's your supervisor's name and number? Oh, yeah, he said as he wrote the info down to hand to me.

Perhaps poor Jon realized I'd be writing a letter to corporate about my experience (which I did) or even posting about this on my blog. I don't doubt that Jon's a decent person and normally does a good job, and this really isn't about him so much as it is about Verizon overall. Don't tell me I'm the only person who got that postcard who wanted both to upgrade phones and to get a free month for renewing. They knew there'd be people like that because they took the time to assure us that renewing wouldn't impact our ability to upgrade. What they didn't do was to fix their systems or train their associates to handle that. In other words they took an opportunity to make their customers happier and more loyal and turned into one to make their customers unhappy and less loyal, leaving them worse off than if they'd done nothing. Great job, Verizon!

One last whine before I close. Verizon and its colleagues in the cellphone industry remind me of another industry, the airlines. The cellphone companies and the airlines give a lot of lip service to wanting to make customers happy, but really they want to make life difficult for us. Here, have some frequent flier miles you can't ever use. Here, have a sweet new phone that does Mobile Web 2.0, but its features are crippled and you've got to pay an extra fee for web and for every application you want to use. Both cellphone companies and airlines know they've got captive audiences. If you want to use a cellphone, you've got your choice of corporate behemoths that don't care about your needs, and if you want to travel by air, you've got your choice of corporate behemoths that don't care about your needs. Yay, capitalism!


Update—7/9/2007: I did get a follow-up call from Jon's manager who apologized for the screw-up and said that they'd do better. He explained that normally the stores get a bit of notice about these promotions so they can prepare on how to deal with them but that this time Marketing sent out the promotion without any warning. Well I can understand that this wasn't Jon's manager's fault, but it certainly wasn't my fault either. I hope Jon's manager has some luck in dealing with his corporation's bureaucracy.