Consumer Agency Calls on PacBell to Improve Service

The quality of Pacific Bell’s residential telephone service has dipped markedly and customer dissatisfaction has more than doubled in the years since California’s dominant phone company was taken over by SBC Communications, according to a complaint filed Thursday by a state consumer agency.

The state Office of Ratepayer Advocates, an independent arm of the California Public Utilities Commission, says the service declines violate the state agency’s 1997 stipulation that service levels be maintained or improved in the five years after SBC’s takeover of PacBell.

The complaint examined Pacific Bell’s record for handling service visits to its customers’ homes and for delays in repairing residential service, though it did not criticize the quality of the company’s transmissions.

The group also accused the phone company of flouting a state law that requires it to offer customers a four-hour appointment window for visits that require the customer’s presence. A San Diego consumer group sued PacBell over the same issue earlier this year, alleging that PacBell has repeatedly offered only eight-hour appointment windows for installation of its high-speed Internet-access service.

“We are really surprised at this, because everybody understands that service has improved since the merger,” said PacBell spokesman John Britton. “Customers are not complaining about this.”

Britton said out-of-service residential lines are currently being repaired on the same day or the following day. “That is good service,” he said.

Officials at the state agency were not available for comment Friday because state government offices were closed in observance of Veterans Day.

PacBell is by far the largest local phone company in California, serving much of the state and about 7.5 million customers. SBC announced plans to buy PacBell’s parent company in April 1996 and took over PacBell a year later. The state consumer unit’s move to highlight PacBell’s service deterioration in California comes as SBC faces intense scrutiny by regulators in the five Midwestern states served by the company’s Ameritech subsidiary.

Angry that customer complaints have skyrocketed and service has disintegrated since SBC bought Ameritech, officials in Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Ohio and Wisconsin have launched investigations and ordered Ameritech to pay millions of dollars in combined penalties and customer refunds.

In California, state regulators recently have been focusing on the sharp rise in customer complaints involving PacBell’s digital subscriber line, or DSL, service, and on long-pending allegations involving sales and marketing abuses.

Now, however, the commission’s consumer advocates are pressing regulators to review PacBell’s repair record and to establish specific service guarantees that the phone company would be required to meet.

The Office of Ratepayer Advocates’ complaint also seeks future hearings on the subject, an audit of the phone company’s complaint records and new rules requiring PacBell to pay penalties and offer customer credits when it doesn’t meet repair-service guarantees. In addition, the agency seeks an order requiring PacBell to abide by the state law requiring four-hour service appointments.

In its complaint, the state agency found that the average time PacBell took to complete residential repairs went up in each of the years after SBC acquired PacBell in 1996.

The performance figures, reported each year to the Federal Communications Commission, show that PacBell’s residential repairs for out-of-service lines averaged 29.3 hours in 1996, while average repair times in subsequent years have been higher. In 1999, the last year for which there are figures, PacBell averaged 37.9 hours for repairing a down line, a 29% increase over 1996 repair times.

In addition, the time it takes PacBell to repair recurrent problems--those that repeat within 30 days--lengthened from an average of 39.4 hours in 1996 to more than 50 hours in 1998, before falling back to 39.9 hours last year.

The agency’s complaint argues that those figures do not meet the state agency’s requirement that phone companies provide repair intervals that are “adequate, efficient, just or reasonable.”

The group also said the longer fix times show that SBC has not met the agency’s requirement that it “maintain or improve” PacBell’s customer service for five years after the merger.

The agency also cited sharply higher dissatisfaction rates among PacBell residential customers since the merger, jumping from 10.6% of customers in 1996 to 15.8% of customers last year.

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

PacBell’s Hang-Ups

Here is the average number of hours it takes Pacific Bell and GTE to repair an out-of-service line once a problem is reported. GTE has improved while PacBell has generally gotten worse.

Source: FCC

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

Bad Connections

Residential customers have become increasingly dissatisfied with Pacific Bell’s repair and installation performance, as well as its procedures and services. Here is the percentage of dissatisfied customers, by year and category.

Source: Federal Communications Commission, summarized in an August 2000 report by the General Accounting Office