FCC Planning List of Phone Company Offenders
The Federal Communications Commission said Wednesday that it plans to publish a list of the U.S. telephone companies with the most consumer complaints in an attempt to shame them into making improvements.
The FCC said it will analyze telephone customer service calls to the agency’s complaint hotline during September and issue a report soon after detailing company names, statistics and standings.
“Consumers need good customer service information to make informed choices in today’s competitive telecommunications marketplace,” Lorraine Miller, head of the agency’s consumer information bureau, said in a statement.
The tally comes after the FCC already did one study in May of complaints it received to identify the types of problems consumers have had, an analysis commissioned by the agency after it received a high volume of complaints.
“We hope it will provide customers more useful information in an increasingly confusing telecommunications marketplace,” said David Butler, a spokesman for the consumer watchdog organization Consumers Union.
“The study may help consumers compare the quality of service provided by different companies,” he said.
The bulk of the complaints, 41%, tallied in a random sample of a little more than 1,000 calls to the FCC were about receiving inaccurate information from the telephone companies, followed by unresponsiveness in a distant second, or 16% of the complaints.
An FCC spokeswoman said in addition to ramping up pressure on local, long-distance and wireless carriers to do better, the study is an attempt to work with the companies by alerting them of the problems they may not know about.
The FCC held one public forum last month that outlined the types of complaints call centers received and the information consumers said they were given by the telephone companies.
During that event, FCC Chairman William Kennard said consumers are facing a raft of information about confusing calling plans, aggressive marketing tactics and buying products and services from several different providers.
“There are a lot of angry consumers out there about customer service and misleading advertisements and whatnot,” Kennard said at the time.
In one past flap with consumers and regulators, WorldCom Inc. agreed to pay $3.5 million to settle charges that it switched telephone customers to its long-distance service without permission.
The No. 2 U.S. long-distance carrier agreed to issue credits to customers who claimed to have been switched and agreed to institute internal reviews as well as report progress to the FCC.
The FCC’s hotline for consumer complaints is (800) CALL-FCC (225-5322). Complaints can also be filed online at https://www.fcc.gov/cib/ccformpage.html.
