A follow-up on our Verizon woes

A couple weeks ago I wrote about my frustrations with Verizon’s service when it came to the issues my wife was having with her new iPhone. At the time, they were shipping out a new SIM card, in hopes that would fix the issue.

That SIM card showed up on a Friday afternoon, and the rest of that Friday was rather frustrating. When I installed the SIM card, it wouldn’t activate. 10-minute call to customer support and that problem was fixed. So then I tried calling the phone, but had the same issue as before - most calls were going straight to voice mail.

So later on that evening I tried the chat route for customer support. I spent nearly an hour on chat support with a second-level tech named Sonia. She tried a bunch of things, including disabling voice mail, to see if any of them would allow calls to consistently ring through. No such luck. She said she’d file a help ticket with the network engineers and follow up with me in a couple of days.

No sooner did I get off of chat with her than I realized that my wife’s voice mail hadn’t been set back up correctly… which meant that then not only would her phone not ring, but it wouldn’t get the voice messages either. Not acceptable. So, I called in to Verizon tech support. (For those of you counting, that’s three separate sessions with tech support on the same day.)

This time I got a friendly guy from Arkansas who spent 10 minutes getting voice mail fixed, and then another 45 trying to figure out why calls weren’t going through. He found a few more settings on his end that were screwed up, but nothing seemed to fix the issue. Eventually he gave up, confirmed that the help ticket had been filed, texted me that ticket number, and said good night.

We didn’t hear anything over the weekend, but on the following Monday I got a phone call from Sonia (the tech I’d chatted with on Friday). She told me that the network guys had investigated and said the network was working perfectly, so that it must be the phone. Verizon overnighted a new iPhone 5 out via Fedex.

Once the new phone showed up that Tuesday, it was a pretty quick process to swap the SIM card and restore the phone from a backup. I held my breath and dialed her number… and it rang. I hung up and dialed again. It rang again. A half-dozen calls later, the phone rang every time. Success! As she started using the phone she also found that some other things that seemed weird with the old phone were fixed on the new one. (For instance: the volume buttons weren’t adjusting call volume during a call.)

My conclusion: find the right Verizon techs and they’ll get things done. And the iPhone 5 is amazing, but given that we’re each on our second phone within the first two months, maybe Apple has a few quality issues to work out.