I recently had occasion to call Verizon DSL tech support, and actually had such a good experience that I decided to share some brief details. One evening this past week we came back from dinner to find our internet connection in a dysfunctional state. I did the usual song and dance of rebooting the DSL modem/router combo, unplugging it for a minute and trying again. Nothing was working. I pulled up the DSL modem’s Http status page and found that it was reporting timing out on the PPPoE connection. I knew this was going to require intervention from Verizon.
I braced myself for the inevitable. I was expecting broken english, and a scripted support tech that would not deviate from their troubleshooting script no matter how little sense it made. What I found was immensely better. After a couple of automated responses, I was connected to a real human who even had a strong command of the english language. I described the problem, and told her that I was already looking at the DSL modem’s http status page, and told her what the page said. She asked if I’d done the reset dance yet, and then had me try a couple more things from the router page. I was in awe. No jumping through hoops (or pretending to jump through hoops I knew weren’t relevant). She knew exactly what I was talking about, and quickly came to the conclusion that it was probably an issue on Verizon’s side. After 3 or 4 minutes, she asked me to hold while she connected me to someone from the network group.
The second individual verified a couple more things, mostly dealing with the PPPoE login. He had me try a “test” account, and then set it back to my account. My connection was still dead, but he was confident that it was a Verizon network issue and told me he would dispatch it to the appropriate team to handle.
Now my DSL was still dead. It wasn’t fixed for another 16 hours. The fact that the tech support personnel I dealt with were proficient, respected my knowledge and the troubleshooting that I had already done, and quickly and efficiently isolated the problem and started the process to get it fixed, all made this a positive experience for me. A+.
One Man Shouting 