Most of the customer support stories I read on the web are about lousy experiences. Tonight – I had an awesome one.
After dinner, Amy treated me to 30 minutes at Best Buy in Soho to buy a Verizon Wireless EVDO Card for my October Life Dinner gift. The folks at Best Buy did a good job even though they ended up setting me up for the wrong version of the service. My laptop doesn’t have a CD-ROM drive, so I had to download the software from the Internet.
My first attempt failed as the Verizon web site didn’t recognize my cell phone number. I called customer support, worked through the phone tree, and immediately got to a guy who seemed to know what he was talking about. He gave me a special magic code to download the software and then asked if he could stay on the phone until everything was up and running. I downloaded the software and then walked through the installation step by step. When I got to the end, things worked, but they seemed very slow (much slower than my expectation). It turns out that the Best Buy folks set me up with the wrong service plan. Mr. Good Support told me he could transfer me to an account rep to get me on the right plan.
Two minutes later I was talking to Ms. Very Nice Southern Accent who looked up my account, made the change (while keeping me on the same payment plan), walked me through resetting my EVDO card, and confirmed that I was all set to go.
For once, an awesome experience. Thanks Verizon people.