Verizon’s Florida Workers Picket over Customer Service Lapses
Verizon customer-service workers, joined by customers, picketed company locations around Tampa Bay to protest policies they said keep them from solving customers’ service problems and answering their questions. “Informational” picketing took place before work Monday. Pickets carried signs reading “Honk for Better Service,” “Verizon Customers Deserve Better Service” and other slogans. Florida service complaints have drawn inquiries from local and state policymakers.
Sign up for a free preview to unlock the rest of this article
Communications Daily is required reading for senior executives at top telecom corporations, law firms, lobbying organizations, associations and government agencies (including the FCC). Join them today!
IBEW Local 824, representing about 4,000 Tampa area workers, organized the picketing. Union leaders said the company has shifted significant resources from customer service and repairs to marketing and new fiber construction, hurting service. Problems have been particularly acute in the seven-county Tampa Bay area, and with heavily promoted bundled services, the union said. About 50 people picketed Verizon offices in Tampa, and 100 at Verizon offices in Palm River, the union said. There was scattered picketing at other Verizon locations in the region.
Verizon “has hit a recent bump in the road with out-of- service customers, which is not our norm,” a spokesman said. More than 25 percent of first-quarter service failures took longer than 24 hours to fix. Verizon fixed 90 percent of outages within 48 hours and is moving to improve its 24-hour repair performance, he said, predicting that repair times will improve.
The Tampa City Council set a May 1 hearing on service quality. The council has invited customers to air their complaints and has asked company executives to attend and offer Verizon’s side.
Verizon late last week sent Alan Ciamporcero, southeast region president, Woody Simmons, government affairs vice president, and other Florida executives to Tallahassee to talk with the state attorney general, the Public Service Commission and the Department of Agriculture and Consumer Affairs. Each agency has a degree of telecom and cable oversight, and all have heard from Verizon customers about late repairs and installations, mischarges and inadequate responses to problems.