The IT Nerd

The ongoing saga of Rogers support of the Series 3 Apple Watch with LTE has taken another twist. Several readers over the last couple of days have alerted me to some Twitter interactions between Rogers customers and the Rogers Helps Twitter account. Below is one example of what they alerted me to:

Hi PhReAkShO. Good news! We will be carrying the Google Pixel 2 phones. You can pre-order them now on https://t.co/LuQ7gqTRaw. Thanks. ^ll

— RogersHelps (@RogersHelps) October 4, 2017

That is correct. ^ll

— RogersHelps (@RogersHelps) October 4, 2017

Here’s why they pointed this out to me. It directly contradicts this statement that I covered here:

Also, this may or may not count as confirmation… pic.twitter.com/KyE7AoENyI

— Mike Berthold (@MikeMontrealer) September 14, 2017

And at the time, that statement about not having eSIM support was a contradiction to several different statements that Rogers made when it was noticed that they were the only of the big three carriers not to have support for the Series 3 Apple Watch as well as shortly after the announcement was made by Apple. But at the time it seemed plausible based on this:

Fido confirmed they don't support eSIM back in May of this year : https://t.co/jBs3NpB6Vh

— Mike Berthold (@MikeMontrealer) September 14, 2017

And what I said at the time was that if Fido didn’t support eSIM, Rogers didn’t either.

The bottom line is that the story from Rogers has yet again changed. And that change has not clarified the situation. But instead muddied the waters further. It’s almost like Rogers is desperately searching for a reason for why they don’t have support for this iteration of the Apple Watch in hopes of placating their customer base so that they won’t defect to Bell who currently has support for the Series 3 Apple Watch, and Telus who will have support for it on December 1st. This constant shifting of their stance isn’t helping their cause as now people in the Twitterverse are clearly looking for this and (via yours truly) are calling them on it. That’s a #PRFail.

What Rogers needs to do is to put out a clear and concise statement that is as robust, accurate, and truthful as possible. In it they should also lay out a timeline for when support will come so that their customers get some certainty which would allow them to decide to stick with the carrier or go elsewhere. Then they need to ensure the entire organization sings from the same songsheet. I suspect that if they did that, a lot of their customers would hang in with them until support for the Series 3 Apple Watch arrived. But with these constantly shifting statements from Rogers, customers don’t get the warm fuzzies and the risk of defections to other carriers skyrockets. The fact is that Rogers customers are now looking for every deviation that the carrier makes in their public statements, and that’s not a good place to be if you’re Rogers.

UPDATE: There’s still another twist to this story which you can find here.

This entry was posted on October 12, 2017 at 10:00 am 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.