District 70 Assemblymember Patrick O’Donnell hosted the meeting, which took place in the Expo Arts Center in Bixby Knolls.
As some audience members listened to the meeting from the center’s lobby, the room next door had 28 Frontier consultants ready to sit down with individuals to help them with their service needs.
Since Frontier Communications took over Verizon’s services in April, the company has received a steady flow of service complaints ranging from slow or unresponsive Internet and phone lines to unusable television service, according to company representatives.
Long Beach resident Sally Kilbourne said that she experienced significant medical problems as a result of the issues pertaining to Frontier.
“I went through a series of people coming to my house,” she said. “I sat on the phone for I don’t know how many hours, and for I don’t know how many days.”
Kilbourne said she was in shock with the way Frontier handled its customer service, but she was glad that there was a townhall meeting taking place. According to Kilbourne, being able to finally get to the real problem with the representatives of the company was a step in the right direction.
“The area manager came to my house,” she said. “But it took hell and high water to get that kind of response.”
Melinda White, Frontier’s West Coast region president, explained that problems began to arise when Frontier switched the system from Verizon’s to its own.
The term she used to describe the source of the issue was a flash-cut.
Frontier’s Vice President of Government Regulations and Public Relations Steven Crosby pointed out the three main issues that caused the services of telephone, Internet and cable service to crash.
The first issue was caused when Frontier completed the largest system conversion from one telecommunications network to another. In the process, some pieces of data that came over were mismatched.
When customers called about the service issues, Frontier used Verizon’s overseas call center, located in the Philippines, to receive the calls. He added that there was a possible language barrier that affected the customer-service experience.
Crosby said Frontier had to use the overseas call center because, at the time, the company had not yet fully trained local customer-service representatives to handle the issues customers were having.
“I know the crowd in there made it seem like we didn’t care,” he said. “People had been focused on this diligently 24/7 for 14 months. And it’s not like four people; it’s thousands of people.”
During the meeting, members of the audience asked if they would receive some sort of compensation for what had happened.
Crosby said that the company had recorded each individual’s problem and would compensate the customer for the bad service.
“Depending on how long the outage was,” he said, “whether it was a day, two days, five days, they will automatically be given credit on their bill.”
A step the company was taking to resolve issues was to have Frontier consultants on the scene to help individuals, whether they are civilian or large business owners.
White said that individuals that did not attend the meeting, yet have issues with Frontier Communications’ systems, can email service complaints to letmelindaknow@ftr.com .
