Verizon “Cold Phones” Slam IT Budgets With Hefty Penalty Fees and Chargebacks

If you or your team is responsible for IT procurement, chances are you’ve had to upgrade an employee’s wireless device. Most devices are ordered through a special B2B portal, where the business often gets a significant discount on new or upgraded devices purchased on a two-year payment plan. This arrangement means you can order or upgrade multiple devices at once without depleting your entire IT budget. Devices are usually activated soon after receipt, but perhaps your company has ordered devices as backup, or in preparation for an upcoming project. While you may be tempted to put them in storage and forget about them until later, a recent change to Verizon’s B2B policy means you must activate the device within 90 days of receipt – or pay a hefty penalty fee.

As of May 2020, Verizon is enforcing a new policy regarding B2B discounted device activation. If a discounted device is purchased, but not activated within 90 days of the order date, the device is considered a “cold phone.” Once this 90-day limit is reached, Verizon will issue a chargeback for the difference between the order cost and the device’s full retail price. The remaining cost will be charged to the following invoice.

This means that if you paid $50 to order an iPhone SE2 on a two-year plan, but did not activate the device within 90 days, you will receive a chargeback for the remaining cost – a whopping $400! Since Verizon business customers typically get substantial discounts on equipment when purchased with a two-year contract, the difference between the order cost and full retail price easily amounts to hundreds of dollars for a single device. Having only a few inactivated devices could suddenly cost your company a few thousand dollars!

Important Info:

• – The device must be activated on the account it was purchased on, or a sub-level of that account. Since they are tracked via ID/IMEI, it does not matter which phone number or SIM card is applied, so long as it is on the correct account.
• – If the device is activated within 30 days from the chargeback date, the customer can request the fee be credited to the account.
• – This policy applies to all B2B customers except for those who have non-standard contract language or are in the public sector.

GoExceed recognizes this new policy can have a major impact to IT budgets. We proactively send out activation reminder emails to the company’s main point of contact three times prior to the 90th day. If by then the device is still not activated, our proprietary Solve(X) software detects these irregular charges on our clients’ Verizon invoice. If we can get that device activated by the next Verizon cycle, our team of analysts is able to negotiate credits for the charges in order to ensure IT budgets are not impacted.

Many of our customers were unaware of the change in policy before we provided the details. Thankfully, our analysts were able to catch some of these inactivated devices before the chargeback date, or negotiate an account credit – saving our customers hundreds of dollars PER DEVICE. Our larger customers have seen equipment savings/credits in excess of $50,000.

About GoExceed:

Founded in 2001, GoExceed is recognized as an industry leader in Wireless Expense Management solutions. We service over 2 million enterprise wireless devices per year, and our clients range from midsize businesses to Fortune 500 companies. Our comprehensive suite of management solutions have revolutionized the way companies manage their wireless accounts, devices, users, costs, data, cost centers, contracts, policies, and more. We firmly believe that innovation is not only the key to our success, but essential in an ever-changing wireless landscape across the world. GoExceed empowers businesses with real-time reporting and analytics, enabled by Microsoft Power BI, in order to proactively save time, money, and resources. Your success is what drives our passion for technology and innovation.