The IT Nerd

I’ve been tracking a story over the last few days where Rogers has been unable to activate hardware for TV, Home Phone, or Internet customers. This has led to not only those customers being offline, including a client of mine, but those unhappy customers have become the targets of Bell Canada. Not a good situation for all concerned to say the least.

A few moments ago, as in Sunday at 12:24 PM EST, Rogers reached out to me to give me a statement:

Some of our Home Phone, TV and Internet customers who have recently activated or had a new product installed may be experiencing a delay in connecting their services to the network. We are now processing transactions and are working to restore all services by later this evening. We sincerely apologize for the inconvenience.

That will be good news for those customers. And since I can monitor this in real time and I have a client affected by this, I’ll be able to see if this actually happens or not. Thus I would ask you to stay tuned to this space for further updates.

Now, assuming that service actually does get restored, Rogers has some tough questions to answer. Starting with what happened, why it happened, and what they plan to do to redress this #EpicFail with their customer base. And if I were them, I’d answer all of that as robustly and completely as possible.

UPDATE: As I type this it is 7:10 PM EST and there seems to be no resolution to this issue despite what Rogers has said in the statement above. And their customers are even less happy than they were before:

@RogersHelps It's 7 pm and no internet yet for a 4 day veteran of modem swap fiasco. 6 hrs since you announced. Is it new customers first?

— Bob (@bob_christo) October 22, 2017

@RogersHelps until now no internet. Still down. You Saif by evening services will be restored. It’s night now.. what’s going on?

— Kamran Banatwala (@kbanatwala) October 22, 2017

Nearing the end of day 4 w/ no internet and no answers @RogersHelps Need it for work tomorrow 😏

— chandell, phd (@ChandellEnid) October 22, 2017

@RogersHelps Is restored service for new internet delayed? Its well into the evening still no service.

— Bill (@Billbu70) October 22, 2017

@RogersHelps On day 4 without Internet at home since we switched our modem. Once again we’ve been told it’ll be fixed in “4 hours”. Any ETA?

— William Dobson (@TheWillDobson) October 22, 2017

@RogersHelps still no internet service, upgrade my internet remain loyal to Rogers, its past evening time… thought the issue was fixed….

— Bill (@Billbu70) October 22, 2017

Now, the sentence “We are now processing transactions and are working to restore all services by later this evening” can have a very broad interpretation. But the fact is that their customers are very much at their limit in terms of how much slack they will give Canada’s largest telco at this point. I suspect that even if Rogers gets service back up and running for these people in the next hour or two, or even later tonight, many of them will head off to Bell Canada. Plus the fact that these people will tell their friends about this experience will not help Rogers attract new customers or retain some of their existing ones. For an organization the size of Rogers, that’s not good. But I suspect that many who read this will feel that Rogers is getting what have coming to them.

UPDATE #2: There is still no indication that customers have come back on line. More details here.

This entry was posted on October 22, 2017 at 12:57 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.