Neil T Skw

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| map-marker Manhattan Beach, California

Frontier Communications - Failure to fix customer, technical, and billing problems

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Updated by user Sep 13, 2021

Frontier took a month of near daily phone calls and re-correcting botched ways to handle the concerns, to ultimately address the symptoms. Frontier's challenge is that so many aspects of Frontier's systems default to a standard method of handling concerns and a...

Original review Aug 06, 2021
Frontier failed to fix 3 problems over 10 days of daily phone calls. Frontier customer service made promises to make a modest $6 increase in the internet charge if a technician could troubleshoot and fix the cause of our internet speed being around 600 Kbps.

He found Frontier's underground wire in the street needed replacing, a problem Frontier had refused to acknowledge was theirs for years - So we were misled by their statements all that time that there was nothing they could do. The bill was increased 50% from $60 to $90 without our consent. I then spent 15 hours on calls over the next 6 days with Customer Service, Customer Retention Escalation, and Technical Support, even waiting on a promised Supervisor call to address the failure of Frontier to explain and fix their misstatements and lack of follow-through. The supervisor failed to phone, purporting to have tried once but never sharing what number was dialed, which prompted more complaint calls about the supervisor's dismissive behavior.

The olive branch offered was to say the best that could be extended was a $10/mo discount for one year for being a loyal customer, leaving the bill well above the agreed $6 increase. Without the supervisor, no attempt to escalate the compounded complaints went anywhere. This account with the phone company dates back to 1968, and the distress of dealing with over-promising, unhelpful agents eventually led us to stop pursuing any redress of the problems, from sheer fatigue, frustration, and vapid apologies from agents without power to offer any meaningful improvements, own the problems, fix but the most trivial details of the situation (such as correcting customer contact info), or escalate technical, service, and customer relationship problems up the hierarchy.

We were reduced close to tears from so much time wasted hearing placating, empty words, being continually minimized and diverted off-topic from our many concerns, feeling deceived that changes we requested (like turning off call-waiting) and were assured were corrected actually never got handled, and experiencing a barrage of gaslighting words to explain that all these problems from Frontier weren't theirs but ours. We gave up insisting that changes to our phone bill were not explained and without consent, and we got nowhere getting an explanation why their dismissive or incompetent manner of customer service was appalling.
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Pros:
  • Technicians meet appointments
Cons:
  • Broken promises to fix problems

Preferred solution: Price reduction

User's recommendation: Prepare to be gaslighted and minimized

2 comments
FrontierCommunications

Hello Neil, I sincerely apologize for the repeated trouble you have had while trying to gain assistance with your concerns about your service and billing. We should make it easy for you to get help, and its clear we fell short here.

I would like to help turn this situation around for you. To get started, we do need to gather more information from you.

Please message us directly any time 24/7 via Facebook (http://m.me/frontiercorp) or via the message option on our Twitter profile (https://twitter.com/askfrontier) for further assistance. -Christina

Neil T Skw
reply icon Replying to comment of FrontierCommunications

Hi Christina, I look forward to turning the corner on the way Frontier's handling this tanked the customer relationship in barely over a week, when the relationship first began multiple decades ago. It is unacceptable how many Frontier colleagues, on successive calls each day, identically apologized and wasted 20 hours of my time on the phone as I restarted the story from scratch seven separate times.

All acknowledged that, how each of their previous colleagues handled things was wrong, yet following every phone call, their results did not deliver and accomplished nothing, except at the last, a token 12-month loyalty discount - It still is 1) not the agreed amount, 2) not a make-good - it’s an approximate workaround, and 3) not a compromise - It’s a breach of agreement and unethical. Empathizing with me that I was experiencing a difficult time is gross misuse of the word 'apology.’ “I do apologize for the trouble you’re having” takes ownership of nothing and is a poor way to cultivate customer service - It does Frontier no favors. In fact, no one once said on behalf of Frontier that they were genuinely sorry because of Frontier and its employees causing a breach in the customer relationship, through their repeated broken promises to call back, the times blowing me off, and refusal to get someone with sufficient override authority to live up to Frontier's commitments made during calls that Frontier recorded. I am informed 1) the details I shared are written and part of the customer profile notes for acct# 31-0377**-**, 2) the calls were all recorded, and 3) this had reached supervisorial review since things went south so quickly.

Conclusions of that review were not shared, supervisors did not contact me, and no explanation ever came - not just for the supervisor missing the scheduled call time, but also never calling in the days following to apologize for missing the scheduled appointment. Customer service representatives giving boiler-plate phrases and scripted responses signal that the pain points I shared were not being listened to.

To gather more details about the series of calls over the 10 days, please get the context first from the written customer-call profile notes and call recordings, since that was my repeated attempt to use Frontier's proper Customer Service Dept and Customer Retention Dept channels. I do not subscribe to Twitter or Facebook/Messenger.

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