A Better Way to Learn Math
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As many of you know, a week ago, on Friday, August 6th, Guaranteach took a monumental (for us) step and setup our first retail location in the Towson Town Center mall. We’ve generally been happy with the response, including the large number of kind conversations we’ve been able to have as we get the word out about our unique online, personalized method of tutoring and sell our new prepaid tutoring cards. And we have many people to thank, including those at the Towson Town Center mall who have been ever so helpful as our online company has made its first steps into the real world of retail.
One company that has been utterly unhelpful, however, is Verizon. Due to their numerous screw-ups we’ve had to go our entire first week without DSL – and it still isn’t working! Without DSL, we don’t have enough bandwidth to stream our videos and use our site. Given that we are, at our core, a video tutoring website, you can imagine that not being able to demo videos for potential customers is a HUGE handicap.
So, we’re taking the step of blogging about this to see if we can’t move Verizon to action. We’ve tried (so so many times) to get things done through the official channels – but the screw-ups just don’t end.
Verizon, if you reading this, we’re not happy. We’re paying for DSL and YOU are preventing us from using. Fix it. Fix it NOW. We still believe you CAN fix things. You just need to get out of your own way and decide to make it happen. Please. Pretty please with sugar on top. Help us!
How? By sending a Baltimore-area tech out to the Towson Town Center mall, (Suite 7503) to install a floor jack A – S –A – P!
When you do, we’ll forgive you for every mistake you’ve made over the past two weeks, including:
Selling us a speed (7.0 Mbps) that you realized later we couldn’t actually get. And then “solving” this problem by cancelling our order and starting a new one. Time lost: 5 days. (Because it took you THAT long to realize you couldn’t deliver on what you sold us)
Sending our DSL modem and startup kit to the wrong address, and not providing us with a tracking number or telling us that delivery had failed until we called to ask: “Hey, where is our modem!?” . And then you didn’t have a mechanism to correct the UPS address (in fact, you told us that we could call UPS and do it, except that when we tried, UPS rightly said that only the sender – YOU – could change the address. But you “have no process” for that). In the end, you had to send us a new modem to replace the one now lost in UPS purgatory. Time lost: 2 days
Destroying our hope. Once we finally got the modem and moved our mall cart to expose the floor jack we discovered that your technicians had LEFT ONLY WIRES AND NO JACK IN THE FLOOR when they’d been out a week before to setup the line. Since we discovered this just today in the evening, (we foolishly waited for the modem to come) your local office was closed for the weekend and we’ve been left with no option but to turn to the blogosphere. Time lost: AT LEAST 2 days
So here we are: with no DSL and no one who help us with more than a “We’re sorry sir, but you’ll have to call the local office when they open on Monday to schedule a time for a tech to come out... and we can't guarantee when that will be." Total time lost so far: 9 days. Will we make it to 10? Stay tuned.
UPDATE (08/17/09): Over this weekend, after posting the entry above to our blog and writing an email to Verizon CEO Ivan Seidenberg (and CC-ing bloggers over at Consumerist), we received a phone call from, Jackie, a very friendly (and apologetic) Verizon person based out of Baltimore. She made sure that a technician came out right away Monday morning to get things straightened out. We have DSL at our kiosk now and can happily demo videos for anyone who comes by!
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Comments
by Ron Harrison on Sep 04, 2009
I've been with Verizon for the past 2 years. If they cannot get this fixed, I will change to Comcast. I hope they help us out.
by Ashok on Sep 24, 2009
AT&T is probably the best...
by msgec on Sep 25, 2009
Try planning ahead so you can be successful. Doing things on the fly is often costly and not as rewarding, especially in business.