As an old customer of Verizon FIOS, I was transferred with many others to Frontier. I never had any significant issue with the transition. Yeah, their web portal sucked for a while, but my service was uninterrupted and my rates didn’t change. I had renewed my contract just a couple of months before the changeover.
A lesson I’ve learned, but will probably never be able to apply again is, don’t make any changes to your grandfathered account. Recently, I decided to change my home phone number. I never used it, but my ex-wife used it everywhere and all the phone line did was fill up the voicemail with her collection agency calls. So I wanted a fresh start. I called Frontier and over a couple of calls, I had a new number.
The next month, I got a bill in the mail from Frontier. That was odd, because I didn’t think I had any real service done. The bill was my monthly statement. That is odd, because I had paperless billing activated. Further the bill was not for my usual amount of $106, but for $165. That’s no good. As I was scanning the papers, I noticed my new phone number was now my account number. I was suddenly a new customer to them, one with no promo pricing. That’s no good at all.
I logged in to the web portal and saw that all my past bills were inaccessible (since they were under an old account number) and my autopay was deactivated. So I got on the phone with billing support. The guy was pretty confused about the whole situation and eventually gave up, saying the department that needed to handle problems like that was gone for the night. They would call me the next day. Unsurprisingly, they didn’t.
I called back during normal business hours and got someone more experienced. She understood that all that was needed was to restore the discounts on my account. So after a bit of work she said she couldn’t get it back the way it was. The reason is that my cable package was migrated from Verizon and there was no Frontier equal. My bill would go up by about $10/mo. I kept my mouth shut and the rep said she would transfer me to “retentions”, who would have more power to change the billing. Ok, then.
The retentions rep also understood the problem and worked to put the discounts back in. Unfortunately, she still didn’t have any access to restore my cable package. However, she explained that my cable package was going to change from about 20 channels to 75 channels. And that’s not so bad. I rarely watch TV, but the one time I checked it all out, the online channel guide was useless because I couldn’t filter it to only my subscribed channels. So I always got “this channel is unavailable”.
So, for the privilege of changing my phone number, I had to upgrade to their lowest cable package, which was more than my existing package. To be fair, that change was inevitable. I would have to bite that bullet when my renewal came about. In the end, I got a $25 credit, 75 channels, and the ability to stream cable through my Roku devices. All for an extra $120/yr. Oh, and a new phone number, which is really all I wanted.
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