The IT Nerd

In a sure sign that Canadian telcos are frustrating and infuriating their customers, The Commission for Complaints for Telecom-television Services (CCTS) published their mid year report and noted that complaints are way up. And by that I mean a 73% increase over this time last year. And what are people complaining about? Here’s the number one issue:

The most frequently-raised issue in complaints remains the non-disclosure or inaccurate information about the terms under which a service is being provided. This is by far the most problematic issue for wireless customers. For TV and phone customers, the largest area of concern is incorrect charges, and for internet customers the number one concern is quality of service.

Hmmm…. Bell have been accused of that recently. I wonder how they finished in this report. Let’s rank the telcos in order:

1. Bell with 2275 complaints
2. Rogers with 707 complaints
3. Telus with 511 complaints

Additional details can be found here.

That’s not a shock that Bell is number one seeing as the sort of stupid stuff that they’ve been caught doing recently have surely annoyed Canadian consumers from coast to coast. It illustrates just how bad their customer service is. It’s also a major reason why I haven’t switched from Rogers to Bell for my telco services. Sure Bell has a way better Internet offering than Rogers. And unlike Rogers they support the Apple Watch Series 3 with LTE. But their customer service is so bad and they have a reputation of “baiting and switching” when it comes to their pricing, that I would rather just live with what I get, and don’t get from Rogers than to switch to Bell. By the way, Rogers shouldn’t be celebrating Bell’s misfortune as they got caught doing some of the same things that Bell has been accused of.

One other data point. Clearly the increase in complaints is affecting the CCTS too as they have a job posting for people to help them to field all the complaints that are coming in. That shows the level of discontent that Canadians have when it comes to telcos.

If I were an exec at any of the three major telcos that was responsible for customer service, I would looking at this report and say to myself that I need to up my game. Then go about improving things so that my customers don’t complain. But when it comes to Bell specifically, they need to take a bit of a different angle as this just further highlights how bad they are as a telco when it comes to how they treat customers. And I don’t know how they fix that so that they can regain the trust of Canadians. Bell has a good product offering, but without quality customer service, that doesn’t mean anything.

This entry was posted on April 10, 2018 at 8:06 am and is filed under Commentary with tags Bell, CCTS, Rogers, Telus. 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.