Verizon FIOS - "disappointingly" good experiences

[drinkingbird]

I mean, I hate to actually like my ISP. I'm used to dealing with Xfinity for my mom and it is always a literal carbon copy of that South Park episode with them rubbing their nipples and laughing at me.

Anyway I have FIOS 300/300 for $30 a month which I can't complain about, least I've ever paid for internet (and the highest upload speed by far) and it's been that way a few years (they keep raising speed and dropping the price, I was at $40 for years before that, first 100/100, then 200/200, then 300/300, then they dropped the 300/300 to $30). Got my email notice that my bill was ready and it said $35. Went in to check what changed, and it said my plan had gone up $5. No big deal, inflation is driving everything up, but the chat window was at the side so I figured what the heck. Typed in that I was wondering why it went up and why there wasn't any notice (actually I realized after that there was a notice but it was buried in the previous bill under several other notices). Agent said I'm sorry but there has been a $5 increase for all plans in your area, hang on while I check on it. 60 seconds later - "I've adjusted your plan back to the previous amount. I'm sorry but I cannot change the current bill but I've issued a $5 credit to cover the difference. Is there anything else I can help you with"? So you made my current bill effectively the same and locked me in at my old rate, and you're apologizing?

I felt like saying, um, I feel that was kinda anti-climatic, where's the hours of arguing and having to escalate and call retentions and threaten to change providers? Now I have to do something productive with that time..... but I don't think sarcasm translates well to Hindi (or possibly Malay, they both work this time of night).

I mean I gotta say, if you have the option, FIOS has definitely been the best internet I've had in my lifetime, just some info for those who may be considering their options. Or if nothing else, always keep in mind it never hurts to ask (unless its Xfinity and you don't have several hours to bang your head against a wall).

Actually another funny story about Verizon. Back in 2001 and the days of DSL I moved into a brand new condo. AT&T (at the time, pre Comcast) offered cable but next street over, not mine. Verizon definitely had DSL on the street and we were like 500 feet from the CO but my building was not in their system yet and kept saying not available. I googled the CEO's email address, emailed him, he actually replied (99.9% certain it was not an assistant, it was just a quick note that he told the local office to check it and signed it "-Ivan". A few days later, tech was out installing it (1.5/384 - excellent speed in those days). I guess being by far the second in market share in most areas (both then and now) really is a good motivator. Plus with more choices like 5G now, competition is a good thing.

I've also said this in various forums and to many people over the years. I work for a large international company, and with a lot of people in India and Asia PAC as a whole. The US (and most of South America to a certain extent) is one of the only countries where "please" and "thank you" is an optional thing. Not being excessively polite is interpreted as rude in many many countries around the world, especially Asian countries (including India). Make sure you put plenty of those in there, and whenever they say I hope your day is going well, say the same back to them, etc, etc. It makes a HUGE difference on the outcome. I mean, even in the US, they're so used to dealing with angry, irate customers, being polite and friendly is a breath of fresh air and they are much more willing to help you out.

 

[L&LD]

'May I...', 'please, thank you, and, of course (when they ask to put you on hold)' is par for the course for me. As is 'how is your day going'? Which really stumps a lot of these poor support people!

Yes, people without those phrases repeated genuinely are rude.

I don't think it is excessively polite though. It is just decent, common courtesy that isn't common anymore.

 

[RMerlin]

Going above and beyond with a customer can often be something very minor on the company's side of things (that monthly $5 credit won't cause them to go bankrupt), yet it's the best marketing dollars they can ever spend. For only that $5 difference, you are going to start recommending them to your friends and colleagues, just because of the positive experience.

That's something that a lot of companies failed to grasp, but thankfully there are those that do.

 

[drinkingbird]

'May I...', 'please, thank you, and, of course (when they ask to put you on hold)' is par for the course for me. As is 'how is your day going'? Which really stumps a lot of these poor support people!

Yes, people without those phrases repeated genuinely are rude.

I don't think it is excessively polite though. It is just decent, common courtesy that isn't common anymore.

Excessive by US (and western Europe/UK from what I've seen, but to a lesser extent) standards .

There's a time to be firm and even possibly argue, but not from the very beginning, and even then you still remain respectful.

 

[drinkingbird]

Going above and beyond with a customer can often be something very minor on the company's side of things (that monthly $5 credit won't cause them to go bankrupt), yet it's the best marketing dollars they can ever spend. For only that $5 difference, you are going to start recommending them to your friends and colleagues, just because of the positive experience.

That's something that a lot of companies failed to grasp, but thankfully there are those that do.

They've had my recommendation at least for internet for a long time (never had their TV but neighbors do and the video quality is so much better than everything else due to far less compression).

I have noticed more and more companies giving tier 1 people the ability to make adjustments within a certain limit and they can even usually chat with a supervisor to go beyond that limit. They're realizing in the long run it costs them less and makes them look better to just let them do it.

Except Xfinity, they've gone the total opposite direction and locked it all down so often times even retentions can't adjust many things and it has to go to some executive care team (which you have to find on your own, they won't escalate it or tell you about that team).

Verizon is lagging a bit behind with 1G max speeds, but honestly I don't need that much and if it means they keep their prices lower than the competition to remain attractive, fine by me. I'm assuming they're probably on the verge of rolling out 10G though.

 

[sfx2000]

Being nice/polite when dealing with Customer Care/Support goes a long way - most of the reps are either really stressed out (because they do care) or apathetic (because they're burned out, it's a tough job).

Please and Thank You, and even "I really appreciate your time" - it can brighten their day...

 

[drinkingbird]

Being nice/polite when dealing with Customer Care/Support goes a long way - most of the reps are either really stressed out (because they do care) or apathetic (because they're burned out, it's a tough job).

Please and Thank You, and even "I really appreciate your time" - it can brighten their day...

In fairness, some of them are just jerks (most likely the fault of burnout). Usually with those if they are not responding to politeness and courtesy, I just say ok, thanks for trying, and call/chat back for another rep.

Another trick to getting good support is always opt into the survey, even if you don't plan to take it. It shows up on their screen. I actually had one real jerk refuse to disconnect the line so I would not get transferred to the survey. I just stayed on, he kept saying you can disconnect now. I said no, I'm waiting for the survey to come on. Jerk actually then transferred me back to their main 800 number bypassing the survey.

Luckily in my job I work with corporate customers and the vast majority treat you as a peer and are not condescending (helps that my company has pretty much bulletproof service) but there is the odd one out that talks down to you like you're a CSR rep. I've been doing my job for so long I've gotten good at managing those people and turning their attitude around. I do see a lot of them doing it with our support staff, especially the ones in India. I do get that it is frustrating dealing with the Indian support, but I talk to them all the time and they are dropped into a position with no training at all, little to no knowledge, and they really struggle. Then a few months later they get transferred to some other account and start all over again. The large CSR companies (Wipro being one of the worst, Tech Mahindra not much better) over there really don't care, as long as they're making money off these people.

As the old adage goes, you catch more flies with honey....

 

[sfx2000]

they are dropped into a position with no training at all, little to no knowledge, and they really struggle. Then a few months later they get transferred to some other account and start all over again. The large CSR companies (Wipro being one of the worst, Tech Mahindra not much better) over there really don't care, as long as they're making money off these people.

Yep - and with the contract providers, many of them for Tier 1 support have a set of scripts they cannot deviate from... even if they know the updated fix - if it is not in the script...

The reps are also held to a set of KPIs that can be brutal - number of calls per hour, length of calls, and of course the post-call survey results (which go towards the company's Net Promoter Score (NPS))

 

[drinkingbird]

Yep - and with the contract providers, many of them for Tier 1 support have a set of scripts they cannot deviate from... even if they know the updated fix - if it is not in the script...

The reps are also held to a set of KPIs that can be brutal - number of calls per hour, length of calls, and of course the post-call survey results (which go towards the company's Net Promoter Score (NPS))

I can't hear KPI or NPS one more time today.....

 

[sfx2000]

I can't hear KPI or NPS one more time today.....

Are your TPS reports consistent with the OKR's

 

[tgl]

FWIW, I've had Verizon FiOS since 2010. Originally the service was 25Mbps down/25 up. They upgraded it to 50/50 in 2015, without my asking and without a price bump. In 2021 I upgraded to 1G/1G service for more or less the same price. This year (while moving to new digs) I switched to 1G/1G business FiOS, which is close to 3X the price but comes with multiple static IP addresses and an SLA, so it really is a different grade of service from my old residential line.

The original 2010 ONT occasionally froze up and required manual power cycling, which seemed to get more frequent the older it got. However, they gave me a new ONT and new router for 1G service, and then again at the new place, and those have been pretty darn rock-solid.

I also can't help noticing that this latest router has 10G WAN and LAN ports, which is pretty suggestive about where they think the service level is going. A colleague who has had business FiOS at his house for far longer than I reports that they tend to raise the rated speed and/or reduce the price every few years, so I'm optimistic about the future.

I haven't had that much need to interact with customer service (at least since I found out how to reboot that old ONT by myself), but it's been okay though not stellar.

In short, I'm a pretty satisfied customer.

 

[drinkingbird]

FWIW, I've had Verizon FiOS since 2010. Originally the service was 25Mbps down/25 up. They upgraded it to 50/50 in 2015, without my asking and without a price bump. In 2021 I upgraded to 1G/1G service for more or less the same price. This year (while moving to new digs) I switched to 1G/1G business FiOS, which is close to 3X the price but comes with multiple static IP addresses and an SLA, so it really is a different grade of service from my old residential line.

The original 2010 ONT occasionally froze up and required manual power cycling, which seemed to get more frequent the older it got. However, they gave me a new ONT and new router for 1G service, and then again at the new place, and those have been pretty darn rock-solid.

I also can't help noticing that this latest router has 10G WAN and LAN ports, which is pretty suggestive about where they think the service level is going. A colleague who has had business FiOS at his house for far longer than I reports that they tend to raise the rated speed and/or reduce the price every few years, so I'm optimistic about the future.

I haven't had that much need to interact with customer service (at least since I found out how to reboot that old ONT by myself), but it's been okay though not stellar.

In short, I'm a pretty satisfied customer.

I went the opposite way, I had business class originally (moved from Comcast Business to FIOS Business after packet loss issues started on Comcast) for the static IPs and the same day repair SLA. I think it started at 50/50 (they had just barely replaced the 25/25 with 50/50 for the same price, I believe it was 2013 here) and then went to 100/100 for the same price. Then I outsourced my servers and since I had never had an outage (and still haven't in over 10 years) figured the SLA wasn't a big deal. I think business class was $80 a month. When I converted to residential, I kept the 100/100 for $40 per month, it went to 200/200 then 300/300 and then dropped to $30 per month. They haven't bumped the speed in a couple years and their new plans are more expensive (they basically include the router now) but I don't need any more speed. I'm assuming at some point they'll bump it again but not really a big deal either way for me.

I think when they first rolled out in my city in 2011 or 2012 the speeds were asymmetrical, 25/10 or something like that for the lowest tier, then they rolled out "quantum" and it has been symmetrical ever since, though they dropped the quantum branding years ago.

My original big white ONT is still going strong, never an issue with it. My only complaint with that is they expect you to pay for battery replacements and it only backs up internet for 2 mins then shuts it off (keeping the battery for phone service, which I don't have). When their internal battery died I just ran an outlet from my UPS and unplugged theirs.

There was a hack where you could splice some wires and make it keep internet on as long as the battery would last but I wasn't about to start cutting apart their wiring harness. I meant to run my UPS much sooner but when the battery died that finally motivated me to do it. Power outages are very rare here so it wasn't an urgent matter.

I mean, they're an ISP, I'm not expecting every customer service interaction to be stellar, so far have not had any bad interactions, but I also haven't needed any tech support or repairs either. I actually remember now that the rate used to be for 1 year then it would go up $10, but they had no minimum time requirement for you to be a "new customer" so every year I'd schedule a cancellation for the last day of my billing cycle and a new install for the following day. It would go down at 3am, and when I got up at 7 I'd call tech support and they'd activate the new service (with a chuckle because they saw exactly what I was doing). Then they realized everyone was doing it and just make the pricing perpetual.

They did have a brief offer for new customers a year ago for $30 a month for 300/300 with 10 year price lock (existing customers could get the price drop by calling in which is what I did, but you didn't get the price lock). I probably should have done that and repeated the same process but at that point they had added some verbiage that new customers were ones with no service for 90 days. Many were reporting it was not enforced but I didn't want to risk it, being a home based worker and all. And since when they do offer the free speed upgrade, you have to essentially "place an order" with $0 change in price, that negates the 10 year lock anyway.

I would never go back to cable but having the competition really helps here. As of now we have Xfinity, FIOS, TMHI and Verizon 5G, a big change from 10 or 11 years ago when all we had was Xfinity.

 

[tgl]

My original big white ONT is still going strong, never an issue with it.

Yeah, I wondered whether mine was a lemon, but I never had solid-enough evidence to justify complaining. There were plenty of other people out on the net with similar reports.

My only complaint with that is they expect you to pay for battery replacements and it only backs up internet for 2 mins then shuts it off (keeping the battery for phone service, which I don't have). When their internal battery died I just ran an outlet from my UPS and unplugged theirs.

I'm with you. Mine powered internet for 10 min and the voice lines for hours, which was pretty much the opposite of my priorities. I put a UPS under it after awhile and was happy. The new ONTs have no battery at all, so it's BYO UPS or don't complain. Since you likely need a UPS right there for whatever is plugged into the ONT, it's no big deal.

 

[drinkingbird]

Yeah, I wondered whether mine was a lemon, but I never had solid-enough evidence to justify complaining. There were plenty of other people out on the net with similar reports.


I'm with you. Mine powered internet for 10 min and the voice lines for hours, which was pretty much the opposite of my priorities. I put a UPS under it after awhile and was happy. The new ONTs have no battery at all, so it's BYO UPS or don't complain. Since you likely need a UPS right there for whatever is plugged into the ONT, it's no big deal.

Yeah xfinity started doing the same thing, the battery was always included, then it became an optional added expense. If I'm not mistaken I believe it was originally an FCC rule to have emergency phone service and they relaxed it now that cell phones are so prevalent, they just include a card that warns you the unit does not provide emergency service in a power outage unless you add a battery. I think Verizon will rent you a battery backup unit that goes next to it, a second black box, or maybe they've just done away with it completely.

I think the internal battery directly ran the unit off DC (bypassing the rectifier that it normally uses). So now with my UPS it is going AC to DC to AC to DC but hey, who needs efficiency..... At least I'm feeding it true sine wave during those rare outages, not sure how it would behave with simulated, given how accurate the clocking has to be in it for TDM.