The IT Nerd

Frequent readers will recall that my wife and I switched my Internet and Home Phone to Rogers after I had difficulties our previous telco. At the time I said that this was the deal that was offered to my wife and I:

So at this point, I turned things over to my wife who is a master negotiator to see what kind of deal she could work out. We had agreed to only switch the Internet to Rogers. But being the master negotiator that she is, she called me on my cell with the following deal:

• Rogers Hybrid Fiber Internet 30 (30 Mbps downstream, 5 Mbps upstream) with a free modem and 270GB of usage a month
• Rogers Home Phone with three features
• A free 1TB PVR for my TV watching habits (Well, it’s a free rental for 3 years and it’s $1 to buy, so it’s basically free)

That we thought was a good deal so we pulled the trigger and switched. The install was painless, but at the time I did say this:

Now, we’ll see if any of the billing related to this gets screwed up in any way. It’s happened before when we’ve made changes with Rogers and it’s been painful to fix. If nothing happens on that front, I will sing their praises to anyone who asks.

And when I sold my old PVR, Rogers had to go through some gymnastics to get the PVR at the time. That made me say this:

The person I sold my old PVR to called into Rogers and called me back to get the PVR removed from my account. It was five minutes of listening to silence, but it was removed. The root cause of the first Rogers CSR not being able to remove the PVR from my account was because of the way the discounts were applied to my account. To fix it, she moved all my equipment from “cable outlet one” to “cable outlet two.” What’s weird about that was the fact that we only have one physical outlet. We’ve had problems with Rogers believing that we’ve had more than one outlet and billing us for it. That was painful to fix as we had to escalate to the Office Of The President and have a Rogers tech come out and confirm that we don’t have a second outlet. I am hoping this does not create a new nightmare for us to have to fix.

Well, what I had feared may have come true. After a Rogers telemarketing call where the person at the other end of the phone said a few things that piqued my curiosity, I decided to log into MyRogers and look at our bill online. I must admit that this is a handy feature and it sure came in handy today. There appears to be a billing error on our account. Actually, two of them. Here’s a couple of screen shots from our MyRogers account with our personal info redacted:

If are getting a free rental of a PVR for three years that we can buy for $1 after that, why does the rental discount end on September 25, 2014?

If we’re supposed to be getting a free modem for our Internet access, why are we being charged for it?

Clearly, Rogers has screwed something up in relation to our billing. Maybe it was because I sold the PVR and they had to do something to get it off our account? Maybe this wasn’t set up right from the get go? Who knows? I do know that my wife will be calling Rogers on Monday morning to get this corrected. That should be “interesting.”

Now, people and companies screw up. How the screw up is dealt with says a lot about the person or company in question. Rogers has an opportunity to show how well they deal with this screw up as previous billing errors like this were painful to fix. If this one is easy to fix, then I will say that Rogers has changed a lot. Given how well things have gone to this point, I’m willing to give them a shot at fixing this. But only one shot.

I’ll update you on what happens.

UPDATE: Here’s something that happened. If you check the comments below, Chris from Rogers reached out to us. I responded via Twitter:

@Rogers_Chris Thanks for reaching out to me. If you or @RogersHelps can assist in getting this sorted, we'd really appreciate it.

— The IT Nerd (@The_IT_Nerd) July 26, 2014

More as it comes.

This entry was posted on July 26, 2014 at 5:55 pm and is filed under Commentary with tags Rogers. 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.