The IT Nerd

Imagine being one of the three largest telcos in Canada and having your customers not be able to watch the biggest games in the history of the country right when it mattered most. That’s what happened to Bell Canada when it’s Fibe TV product did a #Fail twice during the Toronto Raptors run to the NBA title. It failed once during game five with about a minute to go in the game (which the Raptors lost). Which of course resulted in outrage and forced Bell Canada to send out an email to their customers that said this:

Customers using the Fibe TV app, including Mobile TV, Satellite TV and Alt TV customers, lost service for approximately 10 minutes on Monday night due to a hardware malfunction. The outage impacted all channels on the app, including the last moments of the Toronto Raptors game.

 We sincerely apologize for the inconvenience and will be automatically applying a $10 credit to your account.

But last night with about 5 minutes to go in game 6 (which the Raptors won), it happened again. And the outrage on Twitter was epic:

@Bell are you actually serious right now #Raptors #BellTV pic.twitter.com/XBGIf9XnsB

— Philippe Morin (@philspot4298) June 14, 2019

https://twitter.com/Zilleus/status/1139373073788833793

https://twitter.com/jasjitbawa/status/1139373577747046401

https://twitter.com/WEAGLEMAN/status/1139414020732022784

What’s really ironic about all of this is the Bell Canada is a part owner of the Raptors, and George Cope who is the CEO of Bell was actually on hand at Oracle Arena to watch the Raptors win and accept the trophy after the victory. Something that wasn’t lost on angry Bell customers:

What a joke…George Cope CEO, Bell, on the court receiving the Championship. Meanwhile his Fibe service was unavailable!!!!!!!

— Mike Dominato (@MikeDominato) June 14, 2019

My wife and I almost switched to Bell about 2 weeks ago as they have some really enticing offers to draw you in. But we instead renewed with Rogers for 2 years after they came to the table with some offers that kept our phone, Internet and TV costs within the bounds of reality. And that now seems to be a great decision as it is pretty clear that the Bell TV offering isn’t robust enough to handle an event like the Toronto Raptors run to the NBA title. Let’s face it Bell Canada failed miserably on the biggest stage possible and it’s going to affect their ability to entice people to switch to them. Not only that, I suspect that their retentions department is flooded with calls at the moment from customers who couldn’t see the only Canadian NBA team win their first title.

It sucks to be Bell Canada right now.

UPDATE: Several days after I posted this story, this happened:

Well, it’s great that they reached out. But I’m not a Bell customer. At least not anymore because of Bell customer service #Fails like this one. But it’s clear that Bell is trying to make this go away. Thus if you’re a Bell customer, please let me know how they are enticing you to make this go away by hitting me up using one of these methods.

This entry was posted on June 14, 2019 at 8:15 am and is filed under Commentary with tags Bell. 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.