Why does the bill confuse you about when your contract expires?

Question

Now, I learn the hard way that the upgrade date is not your expiration date. The only date on myverizon.com was the day to upgrade, which was 8.10. So changing providers one month later, seemed acceptable. Today I get my bill and there is an Early Termination Fee for $150.00. I called customer service and they tell me they agree that it is confusing, that is why they now removed the date to upgrade from newer customers, but because we were a customer for so long there is nothing they can do. The only way to get the charge off my bill is for my son to cancel his new contract and come back to our family plan till December 10th. This is the last straw. Outrageous. Why treat really good customers this way?

Answer 1

Dear JonathanK_VZW,
Well JonathanK, I did call customer service and explained the confusion. We actually have a famiily plan with Verizon, we have been a customer for 5-6 years and we have always had 5 users on our family plan. The BP Oil spill damaged our business and we have slowly re-organzied our lives. In that entire upheaval we told our older children they would have to get a cell phone plan on their own. We just needed to save money. So we checked online with the contract expiration times and the date we saw on one child's phone was 8/10/2013. That's when we thought for certain we were safe from termination fees if we cancelled in September, he had some life changes that couldn't let him make the change any sooner. So when the termination fee mysteriously appeared on our bill, especially since the goal of him leaving our family plan was to save money, it was a shock. So when I called customer service and tried to tell them, we would have never allowed him to leave if we knew we were going to be charged, the only solution they offered was to have him cancel his new service and come back to Verizon, which was impossible because they had to pay set up fees for their new service. I am very disappointed with how all this was handled, and that we had no indication that we were going to be charged a termination fee. If anyone would have given us a warning we would not be facing a $150.00 termination fee that we really can't afford to pay. We have three users left on our verizon contract and we will be very careful to let our contracts expire and then that is IT. We are done. We won't be stuck in a contract again, FROM NO OTHER CELL PHONE PROVIDER. Thank you for listening to my total frustration of your lack of communication.
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