Frontier Communications has a bit of a tarnished customer service reputation, having recently emerged from bankruptcy. Some would argue the company is a good candidate for a fresh, new brand. But new President and CEO Nick Jeffery is not totally convinced yet, as he revealed today at a virtual investor conference.
The company is continuing to explore the possibility of a new brand, said Jeffery, who came to Frontier less than a year ago as the company emerged from bankruptcy. He added, though, that “The brand really does run deep, and some say the old one is a bit tarnished and a new one would be better [but] I’m not sure that’s necessarily true.”
Reiterating a point of view he has expressed before, Jeffery said his focus is on “fundamentally changing what we do” and “how do we treat our customers?”
“How do we remove the pain points?” he asked rhetorically. “How do we make billing simpler? How do we make the set top simpler? How do we make service great? How do we make customer interactions with us more seamless?”
All these things “have a significant impact on brand and that’s reflected in touch point and brand NPS [net promoter score],” he said.
He noted that these efforts are paying off in the form of higher touch point NPS scores and new customer gains.
Every week, Jeffery looks at customer experience statistics, including “hundreds and thousands of small things which, collectively, add up to the brand experience and will flow through into improved NPS and ultimately improved net adds as our position and reputation in the market improves.”
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What the company does with the brand is a “tangential” question, he said.
Frontier recently did some research involving 12,000 customers about what attributes they currently apply to the brand and what the company wants them to be.
“There is little doubt we want to be perceived as a more modern, more agile, more digital, more successful and more fun brand than we’ve been in the past,” he said. “Whether that means we need to change the brand or not is still undecided in my mind.”
Jefferies said his thinking is shaped, in part, by his previous experiences as CEO at Vodafone UK.
“I started with an extremely tarnished brand, but I didn’t have the option to change the brand” because it was used internationally, he said.
The experience, he said, “taught me that with the right actions in terms of simplifying your proposition, eliminating pain points, reducing customer friction and building a more modern version of that Vodafone brand, we were able to take our NPS from amongst the worst in the Vodafone group to the best it has been in 32 years. In other words, in the entire history of the company, the brand has never been stronger.”
Frontier’s starting point, he said, “is much better than Vodafone UK’s was” and he summed up his thinking with the comment that “I’m optimistic that, with the right action, whatever we call the company, we will end up with a much stronger brand position.”
Jeffery made his comments at the Morgan Stanley European Technology, Media and Telecom Conference.
This is all BS. For 9 years I have been promised 1 gig service but instead I got 9 meg. Lmao 9 meg. I have to turn off my security cameras to be able to stream anything. Forget any kinda of on line gaming. Every other day I need to reset my modem. Wish there was another company I could use because I would leave in a heart beat. They want to run NEW Fiber to New customers but not upgrade their existing customers.
There is…starlink is coming.
“There is little doubt we want to be perceived as a more modern, more agile, more digital, more successful and more fun brand than we’ve been in the past,” he said.
Nothing about improving the product, only the “perception”. A bunch of business school grads that care about keeping score instead of producing the best product.
The best way to make your brand better would be to sell a product people actually want. Copper lines are a thing of the past. FTTH or sell the company.
I have FTTH at 1 gig but and I would say it’s good. Synchronous gigabit is a good selling point for me but I do feel for those stuck on DSL. If your in a city or built up area it should be a given for FTTH but rural is a different story. I also see the ISPs dilemma . Imagine running 100 miles of fiber to interconnect 200 homes. It’s not feasible even with subsidized grants from the feds.
Overall I’m happy with them aside for the occasional tech support person who doesn’t understand what they are doing. I have spoken with several people who know their stuff, and a few that need to take a few courses on networking basics.
I set up a new installation of fiber line with Frontier on Oct 5th, they could not get the line in by Nov 8th…
I ordered a modem online with Spectrum and got it next day, connect it myself and I was good.
Perception of company is more important or actual services??
I’ve been a frontier customer well since before it was frontier,
I was a Verizon fios customer for a few years then on and get this just a week before April 1 ? (April fools daY) I got a mailer that said Verizon was selling my state to frontier fios.
I immediately called Verizon to see if this was a scam or not, it wasn’t a scam. From the day frontier took control of are state of Florida there were tines of outrageous and loss channels, myself I was ok because I didn’t have troubles, at first .
Then I started ordering a movie that wouldn’t play ,then just no signal at all.. inthe end I’m still with frontier but that’s because the only other options I have are spectrum yuc poor service and bad lines and equipment.. sat company’s are just as bad more so in the prices… so after most problems are better I still can not get a simple box and return label to send back frontier there property a router I purchased a router for myself. Even after the government told frontier to cease and deceased on double charges for router and line usage I just called and talked to my 3rd rep and got disconnected before that tho I was told inordrer to have frontier wifi I must rent a router from frontier…
Let me know if there is a way to make this better….
Fiber customer, very happy. Nothing will make those stuck on old technology happy so I say let them jump to Starlink and focus on the fiber footprint, apartments, and new developments.
Frontier has the worst customer service team. No one knows what they are doing. They move you around to person after person, everyone tells you a different story of why they never came out to transfer my parents Phone. “ED” who clearly wasn’t an ED, had no clue what to do. I asked for a Supervisor, got Shelby, she was a snot. They somehow cancelled my order, no idea why. Then said the cant reschedule because someone at frontier is in the account. They said they have to call me back. Cant address with another leader, cant escalate, cant do anything but wait.
They are the most disorganized clueless group of people.
Nick Jeffrey- do better! Do more!