File this in the “what were they thinking” bucket. Droid-Life is reporting that Verizon has decided to add an extra $2 per month fee to users who pay their monthly bill online or by telephone. The fee is applicable when making a payment via the website, but will be waived if a customer enrolls in automatic bill pay or uses an electronic check.
You’d think that Verizon would have done some homework before making this announcement. Customers do not like price increases, as evidenced by the Netflix price hike earlier this year. At the same time, companies have been pushing people to pay their bills online for years. The infrastructure to handle these payments is already in place and this is clearly just a ploy to convince customers to setup recurring automated payments so that Verizon can ensure that they receive their monthly payments.
To make things even more embarrassing for the company, yesterday Verizon experienced their third wireless data outage in December. Despite claiming to be the nation’s most reliable wireless network, many customers have been unable to use their 3G and 4G data plans so the timing of the fee increase is very puzzling.
Will you consider switching providers based on this news, or has Verizon given customers enough options to be able to avoid the extra convenience fee that it’s not really a big issue?
Image courtesy of Droid-Life.com
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