Digging deeper on data use

Lou Sigillo began his career as a customer service representative, and is a leader in Verizon’s wireless customer service group.  With more than 20 years of experience, he is a strong advocate for Verizon customers.

112 million Americans put their trust in us to deliver a great wireless experience, and we take that responsibility seriously.  We only succeed when we delight our customers every day.  Your trust is very important to us, and that means we must make sure our bills are right every time, and that you have great tools to manage your data use. 

It also means admitting when we’ve made a mistake, and ensuring that you’re not ever surprised by your bill.  So when recent media reports profiled one of our customers who was shocked by an unexpected $9,100 bill resulting from data overage charges, we reached out directly to our customer, explained what had happened and resolved the issue quickly.

That story has other customers wanting to better understand their own data use and bills, and we take each of those inquiries seriously.  Our experts are working with each individual who contacts us to review their data use, clarify what’s going on, and explain tools for managing their data use and bills. While we haven’t found any anomalies, we won’t rest until we handle each customer’s questions and resolve any billing concerns.

Critical to delivering an exceptional experience is making sure your bill is correct and understandable, every time.

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Ericsson analysts note that over 12 months, mobile data use has climbed 60% (Ericsson Mobility Report). As apps proliferate, rich mobile websites use more data than ever, and there are new ways to access your mobile world, we’ve got to do a great job making it all understandable, and ensure our accounting of your use is correct.

We’ve anticipated your desire to understand and manage your own wireless experience, and earlier this year launched the new My Verizon app. But you can always let us know directly if you have a question about your bill. If you go over your plan, need to upsize or downsize your data, or just wonder why things seem out-of-whack with your experience, let’s get to the heart of the matter as quickly as possible.

Every month we take great care to help ensure your bill is right:

• We perform a variety of automated checks to help ensure billing accuracy and to identify potential problems so we can take action to address them:

1. We monitor the voice, text and data traffic across our entire network against the expected traffic to ensure that our systems accurately count your data use.
2. We also review millions of actual customer bills before they are sent, to ensure that our customers' network use is accurately reflected on their bills.

• We review use of top apps that use a lot of data, and that can also affect battery life. Learn about those data-hungry apps.
• If you’re on The New Verizon Plan, you get Safety Mode for free, which means data overage charges are a thing of the past. When you enable Safety Mode, once you’ve hit your data limit, you can continue using data at a reduced speed without any additional charges.
• Once you have just 10% of your monthly data allowance left, we send you an alert, and then again once you’ve exceeded it. You can also sign up to get additional alerts when you have 50% and 25% of your data left. We pro-actively monitor these alerts for unusual spikes in the percentage of customers receiving them. We aren’t seeing changes in these trends over time.

We’re committed to doing better every day, so in addition to our regular, ongoing assurance activities like the ones above, we’re digging further to see if there are any anomalies that aren’t clearly explainable or understandable. 

This is what great companies do: listen to customers, treat every customer concern and question with the seriousness it deserves and provide clear and understandable responses. It’s your trust we value most. And we pledge to earn it every day.