On June 1st I get the following email in my inbox:
Your updated email address needs to be verified.
To protect your privacy and ensure that we're sending important information to the right place, click below to verify your email address.
Turns out someone has just signed up for a Verizon account and given my email address instead of his own. No problem, I'll just not click on the link and everything should be fine, right?
Lol... NOT!
In the last 3 weeks I've received 11 emails from Verizon... letting me know my new phone is on its way (and verifying my account and address information), confirming my order, providing details of my next bill and plan details, asking me to fill out a survey (let's just say they didn't get top marks in that one!), etc... and I never clicked the link!
It's a good thing they sent out that initial "address verification email". Wouldn't want all that personal information going to the wrong person, eh?
At the bottom of every email they've sent, there's always an "unsubscribe" link. Great, I'll just click on that... Oh wait, I can't unsubscribe by clicking the link. I have to sign in to my Verizon account before I can unsubscribe. Is that even legal? I thought unsubscribing was supposed to be a one-click thing in the USA?
So I figure maybe I'll get a bit creative and ask for a password reset, the system will send me a link, I'll click the link, and be able to change the email address? Nope. Can't do that either. "For security reasons you need to provide the secret PIN that was used when the account was created in order to reset the account". Oh that's nice, at least that part of their system works.
Oh, here my solution: on their website, under support, is a messaging app that I can use to contact a customer service rep. I'll use that, chat with a rep, and have them remove my email address from this account. Nope. Can't do that, the app asks that I login to my account before I can chat with a customer service rep from the website.
Looking through the emails that I've received so far, I find the name, address, email, and phone of the Verizon customer service rep who signed this person up. Oh this should be the ticket! I'll email her, let her know what's up, then she can use her insider magic to erase my email from this customer's account. Wow! I must have been on something when I thought that was going to fix anything. She outright refused to help. Her reply was "I will reach out to <customer> and ask them to correct the email address". Really?! That's your solution?! The person who didn't know what an email address was in the first place is who we're relying on now to fix this? The person who has no clue what his email address is (or, apparently, what an email address is to begin with) is the genius who's going to get us out of this mess? If he had a clue to begin with, we wouldn't be here, would we?! When I, politely, point this out to her, she then asks if I know <customer>'s email address so she can change it to that. WTF??! How do you expect me to know the correct email address of some random whack-job on the Internet? I'm so stupid, I should have just said "yes" and given her some other random email address (like, maybe her own). Then this would be solved (from my point of view). And if she is capable of changing it (should I have given her some random email address) why can't she just delete mine without asking <genius> to do it? Why would she be able to solve the problem had I provided a reply to her ridiculous question, but can't fix the problem otherwise?
So tonight I decided to call Verizon customer support itself and get this sorted out. Spoiler alert: it's still not fixed. First off, the customer-support dial-in system is very adamant that I provide my Verizon phone number and PIN in order to let me do almost anything. In fact, one of the top-level menu items is "if you're not an existing customer" (so this gets me out of having to have a Verizon account) but then if you pick option #6 on the very next menu (for "other") then it asks for your Verizon phone number and PIN!! So I have to call back again and pretend I'm not a current customer but that I want to become one. This finally lets me talk to a person (the "sales" lineup is never busy). I explain the issue. He's very nice and all, but insists that there is no way for him (or anyone else) to change the account information on an account without knowing the PIN of that account.
I understand the point. Verizon (like most companies) doesn't trust their own employees (especially the ones at the lower echelons) and therefore has a system in place such that customer service reps can't log themselves into random accounts and mess around with the data. That sounds all fine and good.
But in 2019, as sophisticated (or whatever you wish to use) as Verizon's system is, there's no contingency for the scenario whereby a customer puts in the wrong email address other than to wait and hope for the customer to fix the error themselves? Nobody anywhere who was part of designing Verizon's systems ever considered the possibility that random users might (accidentally perhaps?) put in the wrong email address and therefore provide a mechanism to remove such an email address from their system? It just never occurred to them that this might happen?
Worse yet, is the fact the original "email verification link" is apparently pointless. Regardless whether the link is clicked or not, if Verizon has an email to send to a customer, the email on file is used whether or not it has been verified.
It seems like a pretty basic oversight. If you're going to have a path whereby the system is going to send out verification emails to verify the email address a random person randomly puts into the system, there should be a little more thought put into what should happen should the email link never get clicked (maybe it could delete itself after a short period?). Or at the very least, a mechanism whereby someone within Verizon can delete an email address from an account (especially if it hasn't been verified). Or even less than that, the "unsubscribe" links at the bottom of the emails should allow a person to unsubscribe without having to log into an account and provide a PIN (especially in the case where the email address has not yet been verified).
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