iphone 5 verizon call forwarding

I'm having terrible trouble setting up call forwarding with Verizon with my Iphone 5. I had ATT with my iphone 4 and never had this issue. I've tried the hardware call forwarding, on-line and calling Verizon three different time, going to level 2 techical help two times. Either the call forwarding does not work or it immediately forwards my calls, meaning essentially I won't know when incoming calls are being made, which is not what I want. The Verizon techs indicate that there is a technical report from Apple about this. How many other people are having this issue? A workaround is to have Verizon change the internal voicemail number (the "you've reached a voicemail box that has not been set up") to the number that I want callse sent to. That works...so far.

KCE