Vexed FairPoint customers air irritations

CONCORD – As people milled about Friday during a break from a packed FairPoint hearing before state regulators, the operator’s voice came over the intercom and said in a well-known monotone voice: “Your call cannot be completed as dialed.”

It must have been a technical glitch – perhaps someone in the building pressed the wrong button while trying to dial out – but the phrase struck a chord with the customers who came to express their mounting frustrations with FairPoint, New Hampshire’s new telephone company. It evoked a few snickers and chuckles from the crowd.

The state’s Consumer Advocate, however, took a far more serious tone when she stood before the New Hampshire Public Utilities Commission to address FairPoint’s mounting customer service and billing problems.

Those include Internet and telephone outages, technicians not showing up for service requests and a backlog of more than 13,000 people in three states waiting for their orders to be fulfilled. By FairPoint’s own admission, some 1,300 of those people have been waiting more than 30 days.

Meredith Hatfield, a lawyer who oversees the state’s Office of the Consumer Advocate, pointed to a report by a consulting company hired to oversee FairPoint’s “cutover” from Verizon. It said FairPoint executives have made faulty and misleading statements that minimize the problems before them.

“The OCA is frankly astounded at the position we find ourselves in,” Hatfield said. “Senior leadership has continued to overstate progress and understate problems.”

FairPoint executives acknowledged the problems, apologized to customers, and said they

believe the situation has been improving in the last few days. The company said it would be back to business as usual by June 30.

Friday’s hearing was called to address the mounting consumer complaints against Charlotte, N.C.-based FairPoint. The company recently put together a “stabilization plan” at the request of Maine regulators, but New Hampshire officials said it doesn’t go far enough.

FairPoint paid $2.4 million for believe the situation has been improving in the last few days. The company said it would be back to business as usual by June 30.

Friday’s hearing was called to address the mounting consumer complaints against Charlotte, N.C.-based FairPoint. The company recently put together a “stabilization plan” at the request of Maine regulators, but New Hampshire officials said it doesn’t go far enough.

FairPoint paid $2.4 billion for Verizon’s DSL and Internet lines in Northern New England in a deal that finalized last year. The official “break” from Verizon began in late January, and prompted the recent flood of outrage from unhappy customers.

Company President Peter Nixon responded to the criticism by saying said the size of the transaction was unprecedented.

“It’s a very large undertaking, the complexity of which has never been attempted in the telecommunications industry,” Nixon told The Telegraph when the hearing broke for lunch.

Earlier, Nixon told public utilities commissioners the two biggest problems have been a drastic increase in call volume due to billing errors and the backlog of orders that haven’t been completed since cutover.

Nixon acknowledged that the company’s efforts to remedy the problems have sometimes fallen short, but said FairPoint is working hard to make changes and has just hired more than 30 new customer service professionals to help.

During cutover, FairPoint also faced a major glitch that left thousands of customers without email access for days or weeks. However, the company has agreed to compensate affected customers by crediting their bills.

Commissioners questioned why FairPoint hadn’t anticipated such significant problems. The chairman, Thomas Getz, said documents recently filed with the commission suggest that the problems got worse, not better, in March.

PUC hearings are typically fairly quiet and subdued, but Friday’s hearing buzzed with a little more action. There were men directing traffic outside the building and a state trooper stationed near the hearing room door as people filed in at 10 a.m.

Unhappy customers, including residential and business customers, were given a chance to speak, sharing their frustrations with the commission.

Stephen Hoffman, who depends on his DSL service to run a small computer organization, said he has spent a total of about 24 hours on the phone with FairPoint customer services representatives.

“I got to the point where I could actually recite their list of questions,” Hoffman said. “Given that I do computer networking, it’s frustrating to see a company that is reacting to all these problems.”

He described 30-minute wait times, customer service representatives that gave him bad information or simply couldn’t answer his questions, Web outages and billing issues.

A representative of One Communications, which provides telecom services to other businesses, said the company is losing customers because of FairPoint’s problems. About 1,000 orders have been submitted to FairPoint since Jan. 1, but only about 55 percent have been completed, he said.

Meanwhile, as customers complained at the hearing in Concord, some DSL customers in and around Manchester and Nashua experienced another outage. FairPoint spokeswoman Jill Wurm confirmed there was an issue Friday with the DSL hub in Manchester, but said she didn’t know how many people were affected.

“It’s back up and running,” she said by late afternoon.

Despite FairPoint’s claim that customer service has improved in the last few days, PUC staff attorney Rob Hunt said complaints to the commission have increased during that time. Hunt also said FairPoint’s goal of “business as usual” by June 30 is not good enough.

The sale of Verizon’s landline assets to much smaller and lesser-known FairPoint has been controversial since it was announced two years ago. Regulators in all three states approved the deal last year after imposing strict conditions on the company.