Frontier Faces State Regulators

For the first time since thousands of Connecticut customers began reporting service disruptions, executives with Frontier Communications faced the state Public Utility Regulatory Authority to take a look at what went wrong.

“I think what we feel good about is how we reacted," Paul Quick, the company's general manager for Connecticut, told the board on Monday.

The meeting came at the request of Connecticut Consumer Counsel Elin Katz in the wake of massive service problems during the changeover from AT&T U-Verse to Frontier Communications in October.

The discussion was a "technical meeting" to examined what happened to when Frontier officially transitioned hundreds of thousands of former AT&T customers at the cost of about $2 billion.

What followed were thousands of calls to Frontier's customer service centers reporting service delays and missed appointments by Frontier technicians. Customers complained of Internet outages, malfunctioning on-demand service, and changes to channel lineups.

Quick said the company has responded appropriately.

"We increased the number of people taking calls. I don’t think we imagined that the call center would get that many calls. We reacted. We’re getting more people in place. We’re getting them trained. We think we’re going to be better there,” he explained.

One customer, Carla MacKay, testified that the Internet in her house went out on Nov. 24 and said she still has "terrible service" despite multiple visits from technicians and calls to Frontier.

“It was very, one hand didn’t know what the other hand was doing," she said.

Quick said Frontier conducted mock transitions in the weeks and months leading up to the changeover. He also said that certain protocols that worked in other Frontier markets turned out not to work here.

He said the company is working to improve the way it responds to customers in Connecticut.

“Ninety-nine percent of the people had a good experience, but the reality is for that one percent," Quick said. "Many of the people that wrote you, many of the people who wrote us, said it’s not good enough. It’s because we needed to read and react. I think we’ve done that in the call center. I think we’ve done that with some of the TV issues.”

According to the Office of Consumer Counsel, more than 2,000 official complaints were reported. Since being submitted to the state, many issues have been resolved. Katz said the public hearing would serve only make things better for Connecticut Frontier customers.

"I’m hoping that this will go pretty far toward getting those issues resolved but also shed some sunlight on what has happened so far,” Katz said.
 

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