I moved recently, and let’s be honest, I wasn’t as stressed about moving my furniture as I was about getting internet and cable up and running. We had Verizon FiOS at my old place, and I was able to transfer it to my new location easily. Getting it set up was less easy, but I was blown away by Verizon FiOS customer service!
Verizon’s Fiber Optic Service, or FiOS, makes it ridiculously easy to do everything online and never need to speak to a person. I was able to transfer my service to my new location via their website, and it easily walked me through picking a shutdown date for the old service and a startup date for the new one. They even sent me the equipment for a self-install, so I wouldn’t need to take time off work waiting for an install tech.
The process was remarkably smooth up to the actual activation. My equipment arrived 3 days ahead of the install date, and it came with full color, step by step instructions. The FiOS app also offered videos showing how to set up all the equipment, so in theory, everything should have worked great. I had the router hooked up in no time, but I couldn’t get the internet to activate. My devices would connect to the WiFi, it would bring me to a sign in page for FiOS, and then it would hang while pulling up my account. So I had to do what I had desperately hoped to avoid-I had to call Verizon.
Not only did I have to call them, I had to do it on a Sunday afternoon. Honestly, my expectations were so low I was going to be happy if I reached a real person, let alone someone helpful. In fact, I reached a lovely service rep who stayed on the phone with me for almost a 1/2 hour, diagnosed my issue, and explained he needed a technician on their end to clear an issue before my internet would activate. He apologized profusely and said he’d call me back once it was cleared. I hung up and fully expected I wouldn’t hear a thing from them the rest of the day, and so I made a mental note to get up early to try them again on Monday morning. Instead, less than an hour later the same rep called me back — he’d cleared the activation error, and he stayed on while I rebooted the router and verified the internet was up and running. Halfway there, just the cable box to go! Easy, right?
Not so much. Unfortunately, I realized I needed a longer coaxial cable, so I couldn’t get the cable box up and running while talking to the helpful rep. Instead, he told me what to do and said I could call back if I ran into any issues. Which, of course, I did. The cable box was steadfastly convinced it couldn’t connect to the router, and after another fast and efficient chat with phone support, we determined the issue wasn’t one I could fix so they set up a time for a tech to come out and finish the installation.
At that point, I was already really happy with Verizon, because normally calling the cable company is a lesson in how to navigate phone trees and automated menu services; the fact that I’d reached real people several times on a Sunday who had been helpful and prompt kind of blew my mind. The tech who showed up proved this wasn’t a weird Sunday afternoon parallel universe fluke, because he immediately diagnosed the issue as one I could never have fixed (the coax cable in the wall wasn’t connected to the FiOS box). He then made sure he ran the cable so it was nearly invisible, staple-gunning it around the moldings and basically making the whole setup as neat as possible. He also showed up within 5 minutes of the start of the 2-hour service window, and he had me up and running inside of a half hour.
Basically, Verizon made the process of setup and needing additional service as frictionless as they possibly could. Everyone I spoke with was polite, and none of them assumed I was making mistakes in the setup; they treated me with respect, and they were extraordinarily quick at identifying and fixing my issues. There’s an adage in customer service that a happy customer tells one person, and an angry one tells 10. Sometimes, though, it’s nice to share a positive experience, and given the consistency of positive experiences I had with FiOS, their customer service deserves high praise!