Frontier executive talks adversity, success

  • By Jim Davis The Herald Business Journal Editor
  • Wednesday, May 27, 2015 4:25pm
  • BusinessEverett

EVERETT — If there’s a wrong time to take a job as a top executive, Vicky Oxley found it.

In February 2013, Oxley joined Frontier Communications to lead the company’s Washington territory at the regional headquarters in Everett. Within the next year and a half, the company saw telephone, Internet, television and even 911 service knocked out for thousands of customers not once, but twice.

The first time happened during the Oso landslide on March 22, 2014. The landslide killed 43 people, burying a stretch of Highway 530 and wiping out Frontier’s lines for Darrington, Oso, the Sauk-Suiattle Reservation and the Lake Cavanaugh community. Frontier was able to restore temporary service within two days to the communities.

Just a few months later in September, a contractor working on a storm drain in Redmond accidentally cut through one of Frontier’s main lines, shutting down service to the city and several surrounding areas. Again, it took days for crews scrambling to get service restored.

While outages happen, the severity of both was unusual for any telecommunications company. Oxley has nothing but praise for the people at her office for their work in those days. She notes the Oso tragedy was especially personal for her employees, many of whom live in north Snohomish County.

Oxley comes to Frontier with a great deal of telecommunications experience, working for years at McCaw Communications, continuing when it became AT&T Wireless and then Cingular. She also spent about four years at Whatcounts, an email marketing startup in Seattle.

At Frontier, Oxley is the vice president and general manager for Washington, which stretches from Snohomish County to the Canadian border. Oxley is in charge of a little more than 900 employees, with 480 based in Everett. She’s excited about what the company offers both residential and commercial businesses. Frontier touts that it has spent $200.21 million in the past three years upgrading service in Western Washington. The company recently started offering Frontier’s 2Fast symmetrical broadband. Oxley, who lives in Bellevue, enjoys hanging out with a new chocolate lab puppy named Roma and going for hikes in Western Washington’s vistas.

She’s also studied music most of her life and she, a partner and an accompanist sing opera at small soirees or gatherings as a charity auction item. They sang at the Rotary district conference in May at the Tulalip Resort Casino.

“We like to say we do all of frosting and none of the cake,” Oxley said. “We just do the songs that people know like from a commercial or a movie like from ‘Diva.’”

Oxley took some time to talk about her role in Everett, the outages and Frank A. Buffalo, the mascot Frontier adopted in 2013. The following interview has been edited for length and clarity.

How is your industry changing?

For us, for Frontier, we’ve been a telephone company for many, many years however we are fully into broadband, fully into the future products and services. There are a lot of providers out there and I would put Frontier’s products and services at the forefront of what is available in the market today and when you couple that with the local engagement model that we embrace it’s really first class.

What keeps you up at night?

Making sure that our customers whether they’re residential or commercial have exactly what they need. The best possible customer experience is a customer who never calls. Their service is working exactly how they thought it should work.

How do you hope to grow in this area?

I hope we grow our commercial business. We have a very solid group of account executives who are highly skilled and I really think we have an opportunity to grow our business fairly substantially in the commercial space particularly because of the products and services we have available to customers today. In the residential area, now that we have the 2Fast symmetrical on Fios, customers are calling daily to either upgrade their service or coming to Frontier because it’s so unusual to have that symmetrical offering.

Frontier seems unique in that there’s a lot of women leadership.

It really does cultivate and encourage female leadership across the whole company. Maggie Wilderotter, who is today the executive chairman of the board of directors, is our senior-most leader. When she started with Frontier in 2004 as our chairman and chief executive officer, we didn’t have any women in senior leadership roles. Today we have six regions and two of our region presidents are women and six of our 12 board directors are women. Across the whole company, we have 5,920 women out of 17,800 employees and 570 of those are in management positions. And 32 of those are actually in senior leaderhsip roles.

Since you started, you had two major outages, one in Oso and another in Redmond. What happened in Oso?

The Oso landslide happened on Saturday, March 22. There were four communities involved, Oso, Darrington, Lake Cavanaugh and Suik-Suattle tribe. Darrington and the Suik-Suattle in terms of the telecommunications industry were in survivable mode. They had 911 and they had local phone service. Oso and Lake Cavanaugh were completely cut off.

For both of those outages, we were fortunate in that we had crisis communications already outlined and emergency preparedness plans already in place. We had to get out there very, very fast to assess the situation. In any disaster, getting 911 service back up and operating is our No. 1 priority no matter what.

We weren’t really allowed to go into the landslide area to lay temporary fiber until Monday afternoon. So the tragedy struck on Saturday morning. We couldn’t get in until really the responders and the public officials said, ‘OK, Frontier you can go.’ In five hours, we laid 14,000 feet of 24-strand, temporary fiber. This was on the mountain, this was through ravines, anywhere that we could string it to get it up to so we could get operational as fast possible.

At 9 o’clock on Monday night, we actually got to go to the Darrington Community Center where they were having a meeting and announced that broadband, high speed Internet service was back up and operational.

What about in Redmond?

The Redmond outage was very different. It was Sept. 20. It was actaully a third-party construction crew working for the city of Redmond that was replacing a storm drain and they cut an 18-way duct bank filled with fiber and copper cables. It took down service in downtown Redmond and surrounding areas, surrounding neighborhoods. We were able to restore 911 service in 24 hours. We were able to restore Fios Internet and Fios TV within four days. We try to get really creative in these instances where customers are out of service while we’re working through the complete restoration.

How are employee relations?

My approach or my belief is that people are people. No matter what role they’re in you can create a culture where people want to come to work and they want to thrive. I personally think we have some of the best employees anywhere I’ve ever worked. You asked about these outages, what our technicians and employees did during those outages, it is absolutely astounding. I do think we have an outstanding group of people across the board and that’s at every layer of the organization.

Tell us about Frank A. Buffalo.

Frank is awesome. We take Frank out to events like AquaSox games or out to a local engagement events. We have a Frank costume that one of our folks usually wears. It’s really fun to watch children run up to Frank and want to get their picture taken with him. I think Frank is whimsical, approachable, very unusual to have as your mascot. Does it speak to our rural roots? Yes, I think it does. I think he makes you smile.

What should I ask you that I haven’t asked you?

One of the things that we’re very proud of here at Frontier is we are a 100 percent U.S.-based workforce. We’re a company that backs and supports hiring our veterans and military. In this area, it’s about 16 percent of our workforce, which I think is significant.

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