FairPoint Communications purchased all of Verizon’s landline business a few years in NH, VT, and ME. They made a big deal out as well they should have – it greatly increased their subscriber base. They also made a lot of promises, such as ramping up employment and rolling out “high speed” Internet, especially out in the northern part of the state. However, they took on a ton of debt to do so – and it showed early on in carrying out those promises.
Personally, their customer service sucked. Just as soon as they announced their “new website”, I went over to set up electronic payments – especially since they had to pay Verizon to continue to provision a number of software packages as FairPoint was not ready with their own when Cutover (when the line transferred from Verizon to FairPoint). Accurracy and quality of response simply sucked when the FairPoint systems kicked in. I CANNOT tell you how many hours I spent on the phone trying to get my online account to actually allow me to pay my bill. I finally gave up and just recently tried again (and was quite surprised when it actually worked).
Yeah, that feeling lasted a whole long time. I called them a bit ago on a billing question and ended up signing up (under NH’s deregulation of the electricity provider industry) to sign up for their electrical provisioning arm, FairPoint Energy (yeah, delusional at the time). Kept paying the PSNH bill as normal – and I did see a small downtick in the cost. But NOT enough to put up with this:
Yeah – pay the bill, get dropped anyways. Yeah, I was “concerned” and immediately called their “customer service” where the auto-attendant said “Due to unexpected high call volume…” and I immediately knew that “FairPoint happens”. Ah yes, once again, I got what I paid for! After hearing that message, I got virtually dropped after waiting about 45 minutes (virtually, as I got dropped from the WAIT list to a generic “please leave a voice mail and we will return your call as soon as possible”. Yeah, like that was gonna fly). Called back again, waited another 30 minutes, and finally got connected with a real person. Who promptly made two PR errors:
- Immediately announced that a majority of their customers had received this same letter
- Then announced, without even looking up my account, that was the reason I got the letter was “an error – just ignore it”
So, having learned nothing from their original rollout here in NH, FairPoint goes and does yet another billing snafu of major proportions. I did pursue making sure that I was actually in “good standing” even as she was pushing back slightly on having to do so (as in “I already told you what the problem is, stop annoying me with your request that is causing me to spend more time pushing more buttons and can’t address the “higher than normal call volume” that we caused to and for ourselves.”).
Nice to see that they see their customers as not only money machines but their QA staff at best and guinea pigs at worst. This is not how one inspires trust and confidence in someone that can make your house go dead. This is doubly deadly when one works out of said home and kinda needs those electrons flowing to put bread on the table (and to pump the water from the well).
A while ago, I had done an interview series with a friend that was representing Residential Power and it had been my plan to try them. When they ran into problems, I basically did an “eenie meenie miney moe” in wanting to try a new provider; I didn’t know I was going to really get Moe from the Three Stooges (even if he was the incrementally smarter one of that slapstick trio)?
The only reason I keep FairPoint for my phoneline is that when the electricity goes out, their dialtone still works (and cell phone coverage here on the Side of the Mountain still sucks – three years later in pleading with Verizon Wireless about their fempto-cell for the home call still gets my goat (er, why do you limit my minutes when your box is routing my cell calls through my Internet to whom I pay someone else??). That’s it – THE only reason. If I could switch, I would. Yes, I know I could switch to VOIP and do use that from my company’s international VOIP virtual network – when it works, it is great and it really sucks when it doesn’t, so why would I want to do that to myself voluntarily?
So yes, I’ll be looking for another electricity provider.
