I cover family phones and mifi devices in 3 states: TX, MD and CA. My brother is long overdue for a phone upgrade and we finally decided to do it.  He lives in TX and I'm in CA which means that to VZW one of us must live on the face of the moon because no matter how hard I have tried to buy him the new phone and sign a new contract the effort has failed.  1st I set it up, gave him the authority per phone consultant and he tried to walk into a storefront and go through the process.  The people he spoke with were entirely unable to compute the concept, refused to take his money and gave him no guidance about how to proceed. We tried this approach twice.  Next I called VZW and authorized everything on my end (2nd time but 3rd try) and after a good hour of discussion with "whoever", he went back to the store.  It is as if none of my conversations with VZW had ever taken place,  Nothing was documented and my hour(s) of hold time and discussion were simply wasted.  Contact with VZW must have just been blather with another know-nothing respondent.  Tried yet again using the online ordering option and my account access was closed for fraud (???) because my brother lives in TX and I'm in CA. Notwithstanding, VZW autopayments went through, they were happy to take the possibly fraudulent money.  Crazy.  Now I'm deeply into long conversations with VZW phone respondents using reference numbers and requesting supervisors (so they say) and the first one of these was guaranteed to work-- no question about it-- promises to personally follow through, etc.  No phone sent to my brother.  Nothing.  So I called again, repeated all the steps with double triple checks of credit card numbers (none of which were ever invalid as demonstrated by the charges that went through without difficulty) double triple checking addresses and which numbers are connected to which phones.... From VZW profuse apologies and promise to overnite phone-- gee whiz--- about 28 days late.  Today I have an email saying that phone won't be sent until I press a button and authorize/accept the agreement.  Which I did verbally on the phone previously and which I also did by punching a bunch of things into the phone service I was transferred to precisely for this purpose.  In fact, I was carefully instructed to do this immediately so that the phone COULD be sent right away.  So today no overnited phone will arrive.  After placing another 2 calls to VZW today (the first was simply cut off) I was told a supervisor would call me in 48 hrs by someone who seemed to take a little bit of pleasure in reinforcing multiple times that no one could get back to me today.  Huh?  I've got to say that in all of my years dealing with incompetence and lies (this is what you call a promise that you know will not take place VZW) this has been the worst experience ever. 

Not incidentally, I am responsible for the business phone operations for a large organization and will make sure that we are no longer VZW customers when the contract is scheduled for renegotiation.  If VZW can't deal with family plans why should I trust them with our corporate account?  Shocking degree of ignorance, indifference, inefficiency and poor management strategy demonstrated consistently-- among other things.  VZW should assume that the way individual customers are treated may impact the bottom line in much bigger ways than it might appear.