Customer could not get Verizon to register his device until he tricked them

No matter which carrier you use, the odds are that you have a story to tell about how you were ignored by the big faceless wireless provider. Of course, as the "little guy" in this battle, you had to fight with all of your might for justice. ZDNet today explained what happened to a wireless customer named Kevin and how he managed to capture the attention of Verizon after the firm refused to give him the customer service he needed.

Kevin was traveling to an out-of-the-way location on the U.S. east coast but he was worried about having a good Wi-Fi connection. He had phone meetings planned with well-known people and had heard that AT&T's signal at his destination was poor. So he purchased the top-of-the-line Verizon Jetpack because he needed to have a strong Wi-Fi connection to assure that he'd be able to have the meetings that he scheduled.

But when Kevin arrived at his destination, the Jetpack refused to work just before the meetings were to start. When he returned home from the east coast, he received an email from Verizon asking him if he'd be interested in receiving paperless billing and all he would have to do is register with the carrier. But when he attempted to register, nothing happened.

The next stop was customer service and Kevin was told that they couldn't help him register because he didn't have a Verizon phone account (although there was a number that came with the Jetpack, Kevin did not know that). So he turned to chat and five people were unable to help him because he didn't have the account or location numbers required.

Sure, Kevin's failure to use the phone number associated with the Jetpack was a large part of the issue here, but at this point, he must have felt some sense of frustration having tried to contact a company involved in communications and being unable to connect with them. And to make matters worse, the chatline sent him back to-you guessed it-customer service. After waiting over an hour on hold, Kevin was told that without a Verizon phone number, Customer Service could not help.

Some of you out there might have given up by now and would have promised themselves never to deal ever again with the nation's largest wireless provider. But Kevin had a brilliant idea. He called Collections.

As he explained, "Collections was a lot more responsive than customer service. I went to them and even though I wasn't in collection, I knew someone would answer the phone." Finally, Kevin was able to get through to someone at Verizon that took his information and registered his device.

This could be a good method for getting in touch with someone at a service company-any service company-when you seem to have a problem getting through to a live individual. Of course, there is always the chance that once they hear that you are not about to fork over a credit card number or bank account information, you're simply sent to customer service.  

While the department isn't known for providing service with a smile (after all, they are trying to get subscribers to pry open their wallets and make a payment), Kevin had no problems working the system to his advantage for once. "No, they were all too happy to register my device," he said. "They were just disappointed that the money wasn't in arrears."

ZDNet says that they've been told by some current and ex-Verizon customer service reps that the carrier plans on moving all customer service online. If that becomes the case, subscribers like Kevin most likely won't be rewarded for thinking outside the box by calling a different department to get the service that they find impossible to receive going through the normal process.