Improve connection of my verizon dsl?

i have verizon dsl and it runs terribly slow. i have heard that you can contact your isp and tell them that ur not getting the connection u shuld be and theyll fix it. is this true? if so where would i contact them and what should i say to them. and to give u an idea, i download, at best, 20kbps so a 40mb file takes me like an hour or two. eventually, if the download takes too long(which it always does because of my download speed), it slows down to about 1-8kbps.