The IT Nerd

It’s time to dump Bell as my home phone provider.

After our recent experience with their customer service (and no, I don’t care that Bell is trying to improve on that), my wife and I decided that it was time for Bell to go. Frequent readers will recall that we did a test drive of Rogers Home Phone and found it to be a very good product. But the fact that it relied on a battery that lasted 6 hours at most bothered us. Plus we have DSL Internet access which meant that we would have to either get a dry loop to keep DSL or switch to a non DSL Internet provider. Given that we like Teksavvy our DSL provider as they have excellent customer service, the odds of us switching Internet providers was zero. That’s when we remembered that Teksavvy also offers Home Phone service. We looked at the pricing and we could save just over $12 by switching to them. The only downside is that they use Bell copper to deliver service as they are a Bell wholesaler, so Bell still gets money from us. But they’d get much less money from us and we’d be dealing with a company that delivers excellent customer service. That was good enough for us to switch. All we had to do is first confirm that we’re not under a contract with Bell.

That turned out to be entertaining.

My wife called Bell and confirmed that we’re not under contract, which meant we could switch home phone providers at will. Then the person in whatever call center in India that Bell has contracted (as the person was clearly Indian) who clearly clued in that we were looking to dump Bell then offered my wife a deal of $34.94 a month for 6 months if we agreed to a 12 month contract (which would only save us $5 a month). She declined the offer and tried to end the call. That’s when he offered to transfer her to the “loyalty” department. I guess that department has better deals than he can offer. She refused that too. He also tried to sell her TV and Internet which she also refused. In fact with all his attempts to offer us deals to keep us as a customer, it took over 5 minutes for my wife to get off the phone.

Talk about aggressive. I wonder what Bell will do when we actually pull the plug on them? Not that it matters, because we’ll be another lost customer to them.

On Monday we call Teksavvy. I’ll post about what happens.

This entry was posted on March 13, 2010 at 8:16 pm and is filed under Commentary with tags Bell, Teksavvy. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.