Bell Canada Wants To Change The Rules To Stop Customers From Leaving
Bell Canada has recently asked the CRTC to allow them to use some extraordnary measures to keep customers which include forcing people who want to leave Bell Canada to go through them to leave rather then letting the customers leave first and then having new telco act on their behalf to move their phone number across to the new telco. The following is from this document (Warning: The document is in a ZIP file) that was submitted to the CRTC by Bell:
For the forgoing reasons the Companies request that the Commission remove from TSPs the authority to act on the end-users’ behalf in order to cancel local and long-distance services with their existing TSP during the customer transfer process. The authority to cancel service on end-users’ behalf is no longer warranted, continuing to mandate this authority is detrimental to customers’ interests, is an unnecessary hindrance to competition and is contrary to the Policy Direction.
TSP’s by the way are the newer telcos like Rogers for example who offer phone services that compete against Bell’s offerings.
I believe this submission has to do with their Q4 numbers which show the following interesting item in the release they recently issued:
Wireline momentum continued with residential local access line (NAS) losses declining to 72,000 this quarter from 117,000 in the same quarter last year on the strength of customer winbacks and demand for Home Phone packages.
Translation: Bell is losing customers. They lost less customers than last year, but they are losing customers. Therefore it’s time to go into the dirty tricks bag. And seeing how the CRTC seems to be Bell friendly, it would not surprise me if they got their way.
At least when Verizon tried something similar in the US, the courts smacked them into reality. Sadly, I don’t think anybody in Canada has the balls guts to do something like that, and as a result Canadian consumers will get screwed.
October 8, 2011 at 7:47 am
Bell Canada is also losing about 20000 business customers per month, on top of the residential losses. Their Long Distance fees are exorbitant, with 40 cents per min to overseas destinations, when the market has moved to 3 cents for most countries (unless you call Cambodia or Afghanistan đŸ™‚ ). They call a segment of their base as “sleepy customers”. If you are one of those, time to wake up and threaten to leave, or actually leave! I’m an ex-Bell rep that lost my job due to outsourcing.
July 19, 2013 at 11:09 am
and also wrong billing in always favor bell I have to keep calling them to fix hans
January 10, 2014 at 7:40 pm
If you have landline phone with Bell and want to switch to landline with Teksavvy. Nope, can’t do it. Bell strong armed them for taking too many of their customers and now by law, Teksavvy can’t offer Landline service to existing Bell customers. Scum, everyone needs to jump ship, take that POS organization down.