Following on the heels of it's third network outage last month, Verizon Wireless announced that the problem that caused the network to fail has been fixed. It also decided that this was the ideal time to let customers know that there's a chance they'd have to pay an additional $2/month fee just to pay their bill. Those customers that pay their bills over the phone or on Verizon Wireless' website will be charged a $2 monthly fee. For no reason at all. Those who wish to avoid this unnecessary fee can choose to send a check to the company, pay their bill through the online bill pay functionality of their bank or assign a credit card to their online account to have the payment automatically charged to their credit card.
This makes absolutely no sense to me. While it is clear the company is looking to streamline it's operations and possibly eliminate workers who process customer bills by forcing paying customers into paying through online options, the one that sticks out to me is the hand written check. Doesn't that still require someone to scan or process the check? Am I missing something here? I understand that many times companies make decisions to save money, but this one has me scratching my head. More importantly, how is this any different than what Bank of America tried to do a couple of months ago with charging customers a $5 monthly fee just for having a debit card? Customers became so outraged at the idea of being charged all of a sudden for the same service that they had received for years that they threatened a mass exodus from the bank. If you are a Verizon Wireless customer that pays over the phone or through the company website, isn't this the exact same thing? Who are the executives that think this is ok and don't they read what happened to Bank of America? Is somehow making it a $2 fee more acceptable than a $5 fee? Maybe I'm making a much bigger deal out of this than it needs to be but it bears asking these questions. Maybe these executives studied the Bank of America situation and are using a different strategy going forward, but somehow, this all seems very wrong. It'll be interesting to see if customer outrage causes the company to rescind the idea, much like what happened with B of A.
If you want to read more about the changes at Verizon Wireless
click here.
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Posted by GetHuman on Wed, 4 Jan 2012 5:07pm