Us West Service Standards Sought State Regulators Team Up In Pursuit Of Better Customer Service

Like the irritating buzz of a busy signal, US West’s customer-service woes linger, and utility regulators are not sitting still for it.

For the first time, regulators in the 14 states where US West operates - including those who previously have imposed fines and tightened rules - are banding together to develop uniform customer-service standards to assess US West’s performance.

“We’ve decided to go ahead as a region and set benchmarks for service quality,” said Joan Smith, an Oregon regulator who chairs the utility Regional Oversight Committee.

Since last October, US West Communications Inc. has cut the number of people waiting more than a month for telephone service by 52 percent and made it easier to reach customer-service representatives at business offices.

“Yes, they have made improvements since last year when they got way out in front of themselves in refiguring their business … but there is a way to go,” Smith said. “These things should not be happening if they really want to be competitive.”

The Colorado-based US West serves over 14 million customers in Arizona, Colorado, Idaho, Iowa, Minnesota, Montana, Nebraska, New Mexico, North Dakota, Oregon, South Dakota, Utah, Washington and Wyoming.

The uniform rules, scheduled to be drafted by the fall, would be available for each state to use as a model. Each state would retain independent authority, the regulators said.

Among the issues to be addressed are: held orders, ease in reaching business offices, missed installation dates and missed repair appointments, said Montana utility regulator Bob Rowe.

“The held order problem continues to be very severe,” he said. “We also have concerns about other service issues, including access to service centers.”

US West officials realize the steps taken to date haven’t resolved problems completely, said company spokesman Dave Banks.

“I think in the long term, the solution here is still re-engineering and getting our processes and our systems in place that are going to be able to deal with customers, today’s customers, and today’s customer expectations,” he said.

During the past two to three years, US West has been battered by complaints about poor service.

Thousands of customers have been forced to wait months and, in some cases, years for basic telephone service. At a peak last fall, 5,114 people had waited more than 30 days for service.

Others have complained about long waits for repairs, persistent busy signals on US West business office telephones and inaccurate information from company representatives.

US West officials have said they were caught off guard by the region’s booming population, which occurred as they were restructuring the company to prepare for a future in the cable-telephone field.

In response to the problems, US West assigned 1,300 workers to residential operations and shuffled some scheduling in January.

The result was a reduction in people waiting more than 30 days for service - called “held orders” in company lingo - from 5,114 in October to 1,797 in January. Held orders totaled 2,443 at the end of March, down 25 percent from March 1994.

At the end of March, US West met or exceeded its internal standard of answering within 20 seconds at least 80 percent of the calls to repair offices. It answered 79.2 percent of the business repair calls within 20 seconds.

The company also began offering alternatives to waiting customers in some states, including vouchers for cellular telephone service.