Diane Seimetz Duncan on Facebook 4 years ago
03/07/2017, 04:04 AM
While in transition shopping for a new house, we signed up for Frontier's pay-as-you-go plan as a flexible option for our rental home. We finally identified a new home in a nearby town, and I contacted Frontier about being our service provider at that address as well. We knew it would take us a couple of weeks to pack and move things over a car load at a time, so we arranged with the rep to turn the power on at the new house that coming Friday, but keep service coming to the rental until we were completely cleared out the following week. As we busily transported boxes and food for the freezer/fridge to the new home on the day power was scheduled to start, we noticed we were still not getting service as the day was drawing to a close. It ultimately became too dark to see and the temp was rapidly dropping inside, so we were forced to quit unpacking. I tried calling Frontier's customer service number to get a status, and received a recorded message that they were closed until MONDAY! I frantically tried Oncor, the distributor for our area, who did some research and discovered Frontier had failed to place the order. We were basically SOL as food began to rot in our warm fridge... I got on my phone and looked up the Twiiter account and Facebook pages for Frontier. I sent an urgent message to both feeds, explaining the problem. Within 15 minutes, I received both a tweet and FB response from Frontier rep Safiya. She promised to look into the matter ASAP. Just another 15 or 20 minutes later, she got back with me - saying she had looked up our account information and verified Oncor's story - there was a mess up on their end and the service order for the new address never went through. She was extremely apologetic, and said she was working with her superiors to see what could be done. Throughout the rest of the weekend, Safiya tenaciously stayed on the case, keeping in regular communications. Unfortunately, she explained, I wouldn't be able to get service until Monday because Oncor did not do weekend service calls, but she was profusely apologetic and made us feel better someone cared. Virtually first thing Monday morning, the power was on in the new house. Safiyah contacted me several times to insure we were ok, and offered to provide a refund on the frozen/refrigerated food that were lost. I declined, but appreciated her tenacity and concern. While I believe it's IMPERATIVE a utility should be available to handle emergencies - especially on nights and weekends - I will say Safiyah salvaged our relationship with her company. She couldn't personally send out a truck to turn on the power, but she did make us feel someonecared - and we greatly appreciated the effort.