Frustrated Virgin Islanders may experience some catharsis by ranting on social media about poor utility service but unless their complaints are filed with regulators at the Public Services Commission, they may go unheard, officials said Tuesday.
The PSC — tasked with ensuring telephone companies, the Water and Power Authority, the Waste Management Authority, and many of the territory’s ferries provide the best possible service at a reasonable rate — relies on aggrieved customers speaking up through official channels, members of the commission said at its meeting Tuesday. Pulling a commissioner aside on the street or relaying service issues on Facebook might call attention to the problem but likely won’t generate the documentation needed to spur change.
Filing a complaint with the PSC or with the utility itself will create a paper trail regulators can track, said Assistant Executive Director Tisean Hendricks. The complaint link is easily found at psc.vi.gov.
The PSC has monitored 70 complaints against Liberty VI’s phone service recently, Hendricks said. Fifty-three complaints — 44 in St. Thomas and St. John, nine in St. Croix — were not yet resolved by Tuesday’s meeting.
“The complaint team continues to receive customer complaints from current and past Liberty subscribers. The concerns range from issues with customer service, billing, number portability, service and overall coverage,” Hendricks said.
Liberty representatives said they monitored social media complaints but is prohibited by Meta rules from engaging with those customers unless their company is specifically included in the post.
Complaints included autopay billing errors, which appear to duplicate or multiple charges at times, being billed for unidentified accounts, and some former customers’ inability to connect calls to current Liberty customers, she said. Misinformation, dropped calls, and language barriers were other complaints.
The PSC had received five complaints against Viya, four of which had been resolved and none against the territory’s only national phone provider, T-Mobile.
“We have, at the PSC, experienced an increase in social media commentary regarding issues with Viya,” Hendricks said. “We just have not received those official complaints.”
One frequent Liberty complaint was that, in many cases, Virgin Islanders have to give up their 340 when changing providers on the mainland, PSC and telecom officials said. Federal Communications Commission rules prohibit phone companies from using prefixes from areas where they don’t do business. Because Liberty only offers service in the Virgin Islands and Puerto Rico, they can only offer 340, 787, and 939 numbers. AT&T, Verizon, and other strictly mainland providers cannot offer 340 numbers.
Commissioner David Hughes said the PSC was hoping to gain some flexibility with the FCC around the rules.
“It’s actually not Liberty’s fault. The rule is, if you don’t have a local presence here, you don’t have to accept 340 numbers. And that’s the limitation on our clients, our customers, our ratepayers, that they can’t leave here without changing their phone number. They can do it with T-Mobile because T-Mobile has a presence in the Virgin Islands. They can do it with Viya for the same reason.”
Official complaints and online gripes about WAPA plateaued just before Tropical Storm Ernesto and did not spike after, Hendricks said. A WAPA spokesperson said the utility closely monitors social media and has been able to resolve some issues through back-and-forth conversations with customers there.
