It's been over seven years since Brian and I first switched our phone service over from Verizon to Optimum after being, not to put too fine a point on it, screwed over in the matter of a basic repair. We've known for six of those seven years that we could actually have saved money by switching both our phone and Internet back to Verizon, but our experience with them had been so crappy that we were willing to pay an extra $531 per year for service that we considered more reliable.
However, over the course of those six years, this decision came to look more and more questionable. Not only did Optimum keep raising our rates, its service also left more and more to be desired. They made it very difficult for us to cancel our TV service at the end of the promotional period, they refused to let me download any of my stored emails when I switched email clients, and our connection has been unstable on multiple occasions. Meanwhile, Verizon not only started offering FiOS service in our area but kept offering us increasingly tempting prices for it.
All this left me wondering: What exactly are the limits of our grudge against Verizon? Yes, they have screwed us over repeatedly in the past, but does that mean that Optimum automatically gets a complete free pass for screwing us over in the present? At what point do we decide it's just not worth it anymore?
Well, I now know the answer to that question. Because last July, I received in quick succession a bill from Optimum for a whopping $131.66 and an offer from Verizon to provide us with phone and email service, plus a year of Disney+ streaming thrown in, for $60 a month — less than half as much. And given that Verizon consistently got better ratings than Optimum in customer satisfaction surveys — at JD Power, US News, and and HighSpeedInternet, to name a few — this decision seemed like a no-brainer.
Since our previous experiences with Verizon had made us cautious, we deliberately didn't call Optimum to cancel our service until our Verizon service was up and running and we could confirm that it was working correctly. And, as we guessed, the transition wasn't completely smooth. Right after our service was hooked up, we discovered that only one of the four phones in our house would ring, and when we told Verizon customer service about the problem, they insisted that everything was working fine and that the problem must be that our phones were defective. Yes, they found it easier to believe that three phones that had worked just fine with our old service had simultaneously, spontaneously become defective than that their installer had forgotten to hook up the phone jacks. Fortunately, he had given us a direct line to reach him if there was a problem, so we were able to call him back, and he came out the next day and fixed it. So, full marks to him for great service, and negative marks to the customer service rep.
That wasn't the end of our problems, either. Even once all four lines were working, we discovered that occasionally, a call would come in and would get sent directly to voice mail without ever causing the phones to ring. After this happened two or three times, we called Verizon back and got yet another customer service rep who seemed to have no idea what she was doing, so it took over an hour on chat before she told us that she had "reset" the line and if that didn't fix the problem, it must be, once again, our phones that were defective. I wasn't looking forward to challenging them on this point, but fortunately we haven't had to, since the reset seemed to take care of the problem.
So we now know that Verizon's customer service still leaves much to be desired. However, it's not as if Optimum's is exactly brilliant; they gave us a very hard time when we called to cancel our service, and they only took no for an answer once we had told them several times that it was a fait accompli. Plus, even though it's been over a month since we canceled it, they've still continued to send us bills (with no amount due, but it's still annoying), and they have yet to send us our refund for the partial month of service that's owed to us.
The bottom line: I still do not, and probably never will, truly love Verizon. But given the choice between two companies I don't particularly like, I'm definitely happier with the one that charges me $61.26 a month instead of $131.66. When you balance a couple of hours on the line with customer service against $845 a year in savings, I think it's still a pretty good deal.
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