One might think that if a company wants to have a conversation with their customers, once they’ve got them on the phone they’d stay on the line long enough to actually talk to them. But that wasn’t the case for one Consumerist reader, who said a Verizon rep hung up on him when informed that the customer would be recording their call.

Consumerist reader Olivier wrote on Twitter about a recent experience he had with a Verizon Wireless representative who called him up — for what reason, we may never know — and told him the conversation they were about to have would (or could be) recorded for quality assurance and/or training purposes.

“The breezy @verizon guy then asks me whether I’m ok with being recorded. I tell him I am, because I am also recording the call,” Olivier writes as part of a series of Tweets recounting his experience. “There’s a pause. Then breezy @verizon guy tells me Verizon DOES NOT ALLOW THEIR REPS TO BE RECORDED so he has to hang up.”

When he asked the Verizon worker how that could be true, Olivier says he was told that Verizon “does not allow its representatives to be recorded by customers.”

It’s true: if Verizon — or any other customer-facing company — doesn’t want customers to record calls, it’s up to them whether or not they want to hang up. But that could leave quite the sour taste in a customer’s mouth. And of course, this not the first time we’ve heard from readers about similar encounters with customer service reps.

A Verizon Twitter team member did reply to Olivier’s story with a boilerplate response that shows no evidence an actual human read his Tweets in the first place:

A Verizon Wireless spokesperson tells Consumerist that the company “always properly” discloses the fact that a conversation is being recorded in advance, and that “the contents of that call are never shared outside Verizon and used solely for things such as internal training.”

To that end, Verizon says, “As we cannot control the dissemination/use of any other potential recordings, we require that no calls into our customer service centers be recorded outside the appropriate Verizon processes and safeguards.”

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