Is Verizon Customer Service The Worst Thing Ever?

To get this out of the way, I am not a disgruntled Verizon customer. I’ve never been a Verizon customer. This is not a personal vendetta being aired because I had to spend 4 hours on the phone with Verizon customer service or something like that. This is actually just the product of a down-the-rabbit-hole internet search.

Let me explain.

I saw this tweet from GigaOM founder Om Malik a few hours ago:

It made me laugh, and I thought about one of my friend’s horror stories about dealing with Verizon. His story didn’t involve online bill pay, but actually his dealings with a customer service rep who was, well, less than helpful. Okay, there are going to be bad apples in every company, you can’t single out Verizon, right?

So after seeing Malik’s tweet, I searched Twitter for Verizon customer service. Every tweet I saw (and there were plenty of them) was discussing how much they hated Verizon customer service. I took a screencap because it was just so damn funny:

So that got me Googling. Do you know how many sites there are devoted to the fact that Verizon customer service sucks? The answer is quite a few. The most popular seems to be verizarape.com, who is averaging multiple horror stories posted a day. Some of the latest: “I am crying after talking to Verizon rep,” “CRAPPY CUSTOMER SERVICE,” and “Verizon Robbery without a gun.”

Dave, who runs VerizaRape says on the home page, “I have never met a Verizon customer who has not had a negative experience when dealing with this company.” He has bought up the domains verizonsucks.us, verizonsux.com and ihateverizon.com.

Then there is another Verizon horror story site, verizonpathetic.com. It asks you to “post your pain” and says that it serves as a “forum for dissatisfied customers to voice their frustrations.”

And of course there’s a plethora of posts like “lied to” and “absolutely the worst service ever” on sites like my3cents.com and eopinions.com. See what I mean about the rabbit hole aspect of this?

But okay, it can’t just be Verizon, I said to myself. Customer Service from any company is frustrating. And it’s unlikely that anyone would take to Twitter to voice their story of just how helpful a company’s customer reps are, right?

Well, take for instance Sprint. A chuck of the recent tweets rolling in about their customer service is almost mixed when it comes to feedback. Sure, some people say it sucks and they had a horrible experience, but there are way more positive tweets about Sprint, compared to the lack of anything positive about Verizon that I saw:

And AT&T resided somewhere between Verizon and Sprint. Some positives, but not as many as with Sprint. And there are plenty of posts on message boards and forums about AT&T customers reporting bad service. But attsucks.com isn’t registered. Neither is atandtsucks, or attsux. Most every combination I can think of for Verizon is registered, even f*ckverizon.com.

But in reality, won’t most people always be dissapointed by customer service? If you’re having to enlist their help, there’s most likely already something wrong – so you’re already in a bad mood. Like this guy, for instance – we are all just in a vicious cycle I fear:

Here’s the question though: Does venting on Twitter help? Can making your anger public have a positive effect? It would seem so, because the Twitter traffic on the subject is pretty high.

What are your customer service experiences? Who has the best, in your opinion..and who has the worst? Let us know in the comments.