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Citing Poor Customer Service, Verizon Employees Picket
Tribune photo by JAY NOLAN
Carl Kornmeyer, a 16-year employee, joined other Verizon employees on the picket line Monday morning in Tampa to voice their displeasure with poor managment.
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Published: April 7, 2008
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TAMPA - Workers and customers of Verizon Communications Inc. picketed many of the company's locations across the region this morning, claiming Verizon's customer service quality suddenly is dropping off.
About 50 pickets, including union representatives and Verizon employees, gathered at the call center at 610 Zach Street in downtown Tampa before 7:30 a.m.
Doug Sellars, business manager of IBEW Local 824, said it's not uncommon for the union to picket or protest during contract negotiations, but in this case the contract doesn't expire until 2010.
"This is not about any of that," he said. "This is about people sitting in their chairs there or working on [phone] lines trying to do their jobs for customers, and they can't because all managers care about is getting customers off the phone or selling them extra things."
Sellars said about 100 people gathered at the Verizon location on 22nd Street in Palm River.
Pickets said the company has started putting excessive pressure on call center workers to sell products such as broadband Internet service or cable TV rather than fixing customer bills. And they say Verizon now puts too much focus on its FiOS phone-Internet-cable TV rollout and neglects its decades-old copper telephone line service.
In some cases during recent weeks, customers who lost their traditional home phone service waited a week before Verizon technicians could come fix the problems. Wait times were longer in some cases for issues such as static on the line.
The pickets come as Tampa is taking up the issue, scheduling a forum for its May 1 council meeting for customers to talk about issues and company executives to offer their perspectives.
Verizon officials, meanwhile, say they recognize some aspects of their repair performance slipped recently.
"We have had a recent bump in the road with out of service customers, which is not the norm," said Verizon spokesman Bob Elek. "Typically, we've done very, very well with repair service."
The problems stem from a move in March by Verizon, Elek said, to shift some technicians who work on traditional copper telephone lines and put them to work installing Verizon's FiOS fiber-optic telephone, Internet and cable TV service.
That's the company's new, state-of-the-art system – for which Verizon likely will spend $1 billion in construction and networking infrastructure, linking virtually every home and business.
Normally, union officials said, Verizon was willing to do whatever it took to restore a customer's phone service in 24 hours, even if it meant calling in more workers and asking others to stay extra hours.
But as Verizon shifted resources toward its FiOS rollout, some regions of Tampa saw teams of Verizon's traditional copper phone line technicians shrink from 20 people to fewer than 10, union officials said. As appointments were missed, delays stacked up.
Verizon worked to backfill the gaps with new workers, Elek said, but the impact of thin staff ranks did show up in the company's overall repair performance. At some points during the first quarter of 2008, Verizon restored service within 24 hours less than 75 percent of the time, he said. Nine in 10 customers who lost service saw it repaired within 48 hours.
The normal pace, Elek said, is within 25 hours.
Repair times should improve in the months ahead, Elek said.
Florida has strict regulations for the quality and repair of traditional telephone service, in part to ensure all residents can dial 911 in an emergency. Any statistics about how far Verizon slipped month-to-month likely will take time to emerge in state data – much less any penalties for repair faults.
"Our objective, always, is to provide excellent customer service to every customer who requires our services," Elek said. "Indeed, we need the union to do that – we are partners in this effort. … They have as much to do with offering great service as management does."
Reporter Richard Mullins can be reached at (813) 259-7919 or rmullins@tampatrib.com.
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