LBREPORT.com has extended on-demand AUDIO of the meeting plus VIDEO of our efforts to learn the number of LB consumers affected.
[Scroll down for further.]
| (May 14, 2016) -- Roughly 150 people arrived to attend a meeting organized by Assemblyman Patrick O'Donnell (D, Long Beach) that brought over two dozen Frontier Communication representatives to the EXPO Art Center in an effort to resolve consumer issues following the company's April 1 takeover of services previously provided by Verizon.
LBREPORT.com has extended on-demand AUDIO of the meeting plus VIDEO of our efforts to learn the number of LB consumers affected. [Scroll down for further.] |
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Roughly 100 attendees made it into a room with media hookup audio but without audio amplification for the audience; the rest waited in line outside (where organizers assumed a loudspeaker would carry indoor audio but didn't); those attendees were eventually brought into the building, making the meeting room standing-room-only. Attendees filled out cards specifying their issues and waited to meet with company reps.
The meeting, which had been promoted as a Town Hall, didn't provide Town Hall-type opportunities for audience comments. There were no microphones for audience speakers to be heard...and audience members were reduced to expressing themselves with scoffs, jeers, shouted statements and sometimes nearly inaudible questions when Q & A was invited. The meeting began with remarks by Assemblyman O'Donnell, who said its purpose was to resolve issues, not engage in talk that wouldn't resolve issues. Councilman Roberto Uranga delivered brief introductory remarks stressing the need to resolve issues. Councilwoman Stacy Mungo appeared shortly after the meeting began and then remained to speak with individual consumers. The audience was audibly skeptical of assurances from Frontier's western area president Melinda White that the company would address and correct issues; at some points, Ms. White's responses drew audience displeasure (scoffing and jeers.) Ms. White offered a public apology for issues experienced by some consumers. She provided some general technical background to the issues. She acknowledged that many consumers with trouble calls had experienced telephone interactions from an offshore call center that were "very bad."
Ms. White said that while company decisions are made locally and the firm has a 100% U.S. based workforce, the company used an offshore organization (she said the same one Verizon has used), hired to deal with consumer questions during the transition, which ended up magnifying consumer frustrations. "For that I am sincerely sorry; that was not at all a part of what we thought could happen," she said. (One audience member shouted "cheap"; another said, "You f----d up.") Ms. White said Frontier has been "very meticulous about keeping the list of all the customers who have experienced trouble" and will be crediting accounts for time periods when service was disrupted. "It was never our intent to make things tough for our customers. You are the lifeblood of our business, and while I know we have work to do to regain your confidence, I get that, I know that, we will do everything we can to ensure we will stay that course," she said. After fielding a number of audience questions, Ms. White exited. (1) Click here for the Assemblyman O'Donnell/Councilman Uranga introductory remarks Our audio is a podium feed fed to a loudspeaker outside the meeting room (so our audio recorder picked up some ambient room sounds outside the meeting room). Audience members weren't given microphones and their questions were sometimes difficult to discern. Our audio clip ends shortly before Ms. Smith fielded her final questions and exited. Meeting attendees then got in line to meet with Frontier technical and business reps.
Reporters had questions left unanswered and followed the Frontier rep. out the door. LBREPORT.com hoped to learn a fact that hasn't been made public yet: how many Long Beach Frontier customers experienced disruptions out of how many total LB Frontier customers...but to no avail. Frontier rep Melinda White reiterated to media basically what she'd told the LB City Council on May 10: that less than 1% of the company's customer base had experienced service disruptions. Despite several attempts by us, she declined to cite a Long Beach figure of consumers affected. As Ms. White left the building, we were reduced to shouting our question without success. Reporters (including LBREPORT.com) then ran down Atlantic Ave. trying to get answers to remaining questions; Ms. White stopped briefly, answered a few questions and reiterated a percentage of a statewide number that we don't have, then left. For VIDEO of this portion of the event, click here. We still tried to get a firm LB number. We asked Frontier's VP of Marketing, Cameron Christian, and he told us that just under 2% of Frontier's Long Beach customers had experienced problems. He acknowledged this is a big number because Long Beach is a big city and a large market for the company. However as to the specific number of LB Frontier customers that had service disruptions, Mr. Christian said: "I don't have that number for you and we're a public company, we don't typically break out customer numbers...It's not a public number...[W]e have a requirement that we're only allowed to say certain customer numbers, like total customers across the nation or total customers in California" [and] "just under one and a half million California customers were transitioned onto the network" [from Verizon onto Frontier.] For VIDEO of this brief exchange, click here.
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