Frontier Airlines Cuts The Cord on Live Phone Customer Service

Say goodbye to reaching out to Frontier Airlines via a phone call. Or, actually, you can’t “say” goodbye. That service no longer exists.

As of last week, if you have a problem with the ultra-low-cost carrier you can no longer just pick up the phone – landline or cell – and call the budget carrier to discuss your issue with a live human being.

According to CNBC, Frontier decided to eliminate live phone calls in a cost-cutting and time-saving measure. Taking away the phone call option stops lengthy calls and frees up agents for other issues. This allows customers to receive “the information they need as expeditiously and efficiently as possible,” spokeswoman Jennifer de la Cruz told the news outlet in an e-mailed statement.

“At Frontier, we offer the lowest fares in the industry by operating our airline as efficiently as possible. We want our customers to be able to operate efficiently as well, which is why we make it easy to find what you need at Flyfrontier.com or on our mobile app.”

Whether any automatic or text service will have an option to switch to a live service agent remains to be seen. But as some people know – perhaps not the majority, but many – not every question has a suitable online or prerecorded response that is pertinent to a customer’s problem. But as many callers also already know, calls to other businesses have gone this route no matter how frustrating it might be to not speak to an actual agent.

CNBC did note that callers can still converse with a Frontier agent by receiving a dedicated link to have a text conversation.

“We are supporting higher labor rates in the voice channel, and we’re limited to this one-to-one interaction,” Jack Filene, Frontier’s senior vice president of customers, told CNBC. “Think about the most sort of obscure question a customer might ask that would take a call center agent many, many minutes to research and find an answer to. The chatbot can answer that very quickly.”

Frontier is not the only airline eliminating live phone service, just the latest. Upstart budget carrier Breeze Airways also does not offer live telephone support.