I see that Verizon’s customer website and onboarding experience still sucks as bad as it always has

Now that I’m working for a company whose headquarters is in Australia, I’ve decided to switch from my 300Mbit download / 20Mbit upload RCN connection back to a 1Gig down/up Verizon FIOS connection. I used to have FIOS and switched to RCN to save money, but now that I’m going to be doing a lot more Zoom calls in the evening when there are others in the house using the internet, 20Mbit upload speeds just aren’t going to cut it anymore.

Because I attempted to order FIOS service today, I can confirm that although the FIOS service itself tends to be pretty rock solid, Verizon’s online website experience is still abjectly terrible in just about every way. Honestly, I don’t think they’ve made any fixes or improvements to the site or their customer onboarding processes in over a decade. It’s just awful.

Today while trying to purchase FIOS service I ran into nearly 30 issues. How the heck do they get away with providing service this poor?

😦 The Verizon website page for ordering FIOS wouldn’t load in my browser. I had to open a private browsing window to get it to load. Just pure amateur hour stuff.

😦 I was logged into my existing Verizon website account when I placed the order, and yet at the end of the order process it told me I had to create a new website account and didn’t offer me the option of linking the order to my existing account.

😦 When I browsed around the various account settings pages while logged into my old account on the website, to try to confirm one way or the other whether the order was successfully linked to my old account, I got many error pages all over the site.

😦 There is no way I could find through the web site to remove the “router and whole-house wi-fi” hardware from my order. I don’t need a router or wi-fi hardware from Verizon, I have my own.

😦 After chatting at length with an agent I managed to get them to remove the hardware from my order, only to discover that you don’t pay any less without the hardware than you do with it. It’s a complete rip-off for them to charge the same price per month when they don’t have to provide you with hardware.

😦 After I placed the order I received an email from Verizon with the subject “Please verify your email address” and a link for me to verify to do that. Here’s what I got when I clicked on the link:

The misspelling of the word “occured” [sic] is just icing on the cake. And what the heck does “contact your supervisor” mean in this context. Just unbelievable.

😦 I started a chat with Verizon support to find out how to link the order to my existing account. When I tried to copy/paste my order number into the chat I couldn’t, because for some completely inexplicable and insane reason, highlighting and copying text is disabled on the order confirmation page. Who DOES that?

😦 The chat with Verizon support about linking the new order to my existing Verizon website account went about as poorly as one would imagine. I was kept waiting for a long time (how long, exactly, I can’t say, since the chat interface has no timestamps on the messages, presumably exactly so that customers can’t tell easily how much of their time is wasted on the chat). The first agent I was chatting with terfed me to a second agent. The second agent made me pointlessly confirm what I was asking several times. They sent me several incomprehensible messages. Finally after more than 45 minutes, they told me what they should have been able to tell me right off the bat: my old account on the web site was “canceled” (even though I can still log into it!) when I canceled my old FIOS service, and my new service could not be linked to that old account so I had to open a new account on the website. This is dumb.

😦 In addition to being unable to copy and paste the order number from the confirmation page as described above, it’s also impossible to copy and paste text from the support chat window. There’s also no way to save a transcript of a chat after it’s over. It’s almost as if they’re trying to make it has hard as possible for you to have any record of your interaction with their support agents.

😦 After I went ahead and created a new login for the website from the form on the order confirmation page, it brought me to a different page advertising Verizon mobile phone plans to me. There was no way to escape from this page back to the main Verizon website. I had to manually re-enter “verizon.com” in the URL bar to get out.

😦 After I set up the new website account it told me that I needed to verify my email address. I clicked the “Verify” button, and it popped up a window telling me that it had sent me a verification email and I should follow the instructions in the email to verify my address. That email never arrived. After about 15 minutes I clicked it again, once again it claimed that it had sent me a verification email, and once again the email never arrived. Other emails to that email address from Verizon arrived successfully, so this is not a problem on my end. And no, the emails didn’t end up in my spam folder, believe me, I checked.

When I logged back in later to try again it claimed that my email address was verified, even though I never clicked on a verification link, and my mobile number was not verified, even though I had successfully verified it earlier. Maybe the website was confused about which Verizon account I was logged into (the old, “canceled” one vs. the new one)? I honestly have no idea.

😦 I went through the process of verifying my mobile number again, and they sent me a text claiming that I had verified the number successfully, but then when I reloaded the page on the website it still said my mobile number needed to be verified. I waited a couple more minutes and reloaded the page again, and this time it said it was verified.

😦 When I finally successfully placed an order for service, the confirmation email claimed that I could track the progress of the order on the website or through the mobile app, but I couldn’t find any any way to track the order status on either the website or app. After God knows how long digging around the site I finally found Account > My devices > Orders (gee, that’s really intuitive, since an internet connection is not a “device”!), but when I went to that page, I got, “Looks like something went wrong! Please try again.”

😦 When I logged out and logged back into the website, Account > My devices > Orders was gone! It turns out that before, when I found the “Orders” page through a link in a support article, that article had, without telling me, sent me to the Verizon Wireless orders page, which sneakily landed me on a different website even though it had exactly the same branding as the other Verizon site and there was no way to tell it was a different site. This is non-intuitive, non-obvious, incomprehensible, and reprehensible.

😦 When I was chatting yet again with an agent later, I pushed them on how to find the order status on the website or mobile app. They insisted that it was possible. I asked them (like three times) to explain to me HOW to do it. They finally admitted, “Actually the order details should be visible in the home page once you login to the account. Sometimes customers may experience this issue where they may not able [sic] to find it and we’re constantly working on this to fix it.” smdh

When I view the “Account Activity” page on the website I see this:

😦 Clicking the “Review details” button apparently opens the chat window and types “OrderStatus” into it for you, which is completely non-obvious and non-intuitive if you’re already doing something in the chat window.

😦 That same “Account Activity” page has a “Review notifications” link on it, but when I click on that page I end up on a completely blank page.

😦 Given that the Verizon website is clearly stuck a decade or so in the past, I suppose it should not be surprising to me that instead of real multi-factor authentication of any sort, the site uses a single security question in addition to your username and password. This is laughably poor security.

😦 I was over an hour into chatting with Verizon support agents trying to get the various issues enumerated above resolved, when my desktop crashed, and when I logged back in I was unable to get back to the chat. I could be wrong, but I believe there are other websites that have solved this problem, i.e., if you have a chat in progress and you leave the website and come back to it you are returned to the chat in progress. I suppose it’s not surprising that Verizon’s website doesn’t do this, since everything about Verizon’s website is bad.

😦 The agent who removed the router and wifi hardware from my order told me that because I had FIOS in the past and they didn’t remove the fiber-optic terminus from my house when I cancelled the service, they could activate my new service remotely today. I agreed to have them go ahead and do that. But then as noted above I was disconnected from that agent. I used the link in the “Review your order” email the agent had sent me to finalize the order, and received an email a few minutes after that confirming the order. However, hours later my circuit still wasn’t active, so I initiated a conversation with yet another agent to find out how. I was told that actually I needed to speak with a technician to get the circuit activated. This information wasn’t mentioned anywhere in the confirmation email I’d received. If I hadn’t had yet another conversation with yet another agent I wouldn’t have known about it, and who knows how many days I would have set around waiting for the circuit to be activated.

😦 Speaking of that “Review your order” email and link, when I reviewed the order it claimed I was going to receive both $100 and $200 gift cards, but when I finalized the order the $200 gift card disappeared.

😦 When I log into my newly created Verizon website account, I see this:

Fifty-five years ago I was an infant, and this account was created just a few minutes before this message was displayed.

😦 While trying to find the status of my order online, I clicked on the “Manage my equipment” page on the web site and got this:

😦 Oddly, it opened the new page anyway despite the pop-up warning. And here is what I saw on that page:

I can’t even.

😦 Twice when trying to connect to an agent with a long wait time I looked away from the chat window for a brief amount of time and then when I looked back I saw a “Do you still need anything?” message flash in the chat window for literally a fraction of a second, after which the chat was disconnected and I had to start over at the back of the queue and wait all over again.

😦 After discovering that I needed to contact Verizon to get my circuit activated, it ended up taking about another hour chatting with three different agents before the circuit was successfully brought online. One of the agents told me it wasn’t going to be possible and they were going to have to schedule a technician to come out, which it turns out was simply wrong. Not know that at the time, I asked when we could schedule the technician to come out, but instead of a response, I got transferred to another agent. This agent asked me to try again to plug my router into the Verizon terminal box, but then by the time I tried that experiment, it didn’t work, and I reconnected to my RCN box to respond to let the agent know that it hadn’t worked, the chat was disconnected. The third agent finally managed to make the right thing happen on the Verizon end to activate the circuit.

This was such a freaking clown show.

UPDATE: The next morning I went back into Verizon chat and had this exchange with them:

Hello. I signed up for FIOS yesterday and the experience was absolutely hellish. I wrote up everything that went wrong and posted it on my blog at https://blog.kamens.us/2025/03/31/verizon-customer-website-onboarding-experience-sucks/ . I would like this complaint to be escalated within Verizon on the off chance that maybe, just maybe, someone there might care to do something to improve the user experience.

I have had similar problems every time I’ve bought services from you. This is why I refuse to buy anything from Verizon except FIOS at this point. FIOS I have no choice about because it is the only service available with fast upload speeds, but I have other choices for home phone, mobile phone, and TV, and I choose to use them instead of Verizon because interacting with Verizon is always so terrible.

I want to stress this: there are numerous services I would buy from Verizon if the experience of dealing with your company weren’t so incredibly unpleasant. You are losing money by not doing a better job of this.

This is the message I want to get across here, along with the contents of my blog posting detailing everything that went wrong for me yesterday.

I am connecting you directly to our technical expert here to check and help you on this accordingly.

Please stay connected.

Why do you need to connect me to a “technical expert” to escalate a complaint internally?

I did not ask for support, I asked for my complaint to be escalated.

Connecting me to someone else is just wasting more of my time, i.e., you are making my experience bad yet again.

If you don’t have any issue now then I can go ahead and raise a complaint on this issue. But if you still face the issue, then our technical team will help you on this.

I just want you to pass on everything I wrote above as a complaint.

Sure thing.

Jonathan, I completely understand your frustration. I am updating all the necessary details to file this complaint and escalate it.

Please stay with me I’ll let you know once I update all this on your account as well.

Jonathan I have updated all the required details on the account and raise [sic] a complaint, you can expect an email from our team within 7 days on this.

Please accept my sincere apologies on this and our team will reach you through email soon.