The IT Nerd

My wife and I wanted to switch from Rogers to Bell because our pricing for what we get from Rogers was horrible. Specifically, TV, home phone and Internet. Not only that, Bell has as I’ve stated previously, a much better Internet offering than Rogers. Despite the fact that we have had issues with Bell in the past that made us ditch them, we were honestly going to give Bell another chance.

That turned out to be a massive mistake. Here’s why.

First, we placed our order online. It seemed simple enough. You go to the Bell website, pick the bundle that you want, fill in your information, set up a MyBell account, pick an install date, and you’re done. And it seemed to be that simple when we did this on Friday July 30th. And we planned for an install on Saturday July 31st between 1 and 3pm as that was the first date that was offered to us.

But it then came off the rails on Saturday morning. We got a call from Bell saying that our order didn’t go through and it needed to be fixed. But I suspect that this wasn’t true. For starters they were able to read off the exact order that we placed. That seems a little suspect. Also they were able to read off our install date. Then the Bell rep proceeded to try and upsell us on everything from cell phones to smart home monitoring. Which we were not interested in. And to add insult to injury, our install appointment for today was cancelled and they wanted to move us to Wednesday.

The cynic in me says that this was a bit of a bait and switch exercise by Bell. If you phone them, they will have the opportunity to upsell you till the cows come home. But if you order online, they don’t get that chance. So they invented a reason to try and upsell us. If that’s true, that’s pretty underhanded.

So, when we expressed to the Bell rep that we spoke to that this was a very sub optimal experience thus far, the person we spoke to cut our monthly bill by $40 and gave us Bell’s top tier Internet service. But only after trying to upsell us some more. That simply made the experience worse. And to top it all off, they couldn’t get our install date set for Saturday, so we were forced to choose next Saturday. You can call that the icing on the cake when it comes to a horrible customer experience.

After we hung up, my wife and I discussed this and we both agreed that this wasn’t worth it to switch to Bell. We haven’t even had their services installed yet and we’ve had a very negative and horrible customer experience. So we called back and cancelled the order. What was amazing was that the two Bell reps that we spoke to wanted to cut our prices even more to keep our order on the books, even though we explained the reason why we wanted to cancel the order had nothing to do with pricing and everything to do with the customer experience. That was mind blowing.

Total time invested in this circus: 2 hours. And our entire Saturday is ruined as we cancelled our plans to try and make this switch happen.

So to cut our Rogers bill, we’re going to go with “upgrading” our telco services to Rogers Ignite. That will save us a few bucks. Though our Internet will still be the same 1GB service, which is roughly 940 mbps downstream and 30 mbps upstream that we get now from Rogers as opposed to Bell’s 1GB downstream and 750 mbps upstream which is vastly superior. So that’s not a upgrade. But it will do until better options come along. Hopefully Rogers doesn’t screw that up. I’ll keep you posted on that front with a follow up to this story. Or put another way, Rogers who I know reads my posts is on notice to put the their best foot forward so that they don’t end up looking as bad as Bell.

As for Bell, we gave them a second chance because their Internet offering frankly is better than anything that Rogers offers. And we were hoping that their customer service had improved. But clearly that is not the case. If Bell dealt with customers in a honest and straightforward manner, treated them with respect and dignity, and delivered on their promises, they could take over the telco industry in Canada. But they don’t do any of that that. The net result is that while we have our issues with Rogers, for now they are the least worst option for us.

UPDATE: At 4:20 PM this afternoon, a rep from Bell called us back to “recreate” our order. His word not mine. My wife quickly shot the Bell rep down saying that we had cancelled the order because of their poor customer service and to never call her again. This just blows my mind as surely their customer relationship management system had the events that happened earlier in the day. And what’s worse is the fact that there was zero recognition or acknowledgement on their part of their rather shambolic customer service. If they call again today, I pity the person at the other end of that conversation as my wife will simply destroy them because she is that mad at Bell at the moment. And likely for the foreseeable future.

Also just to clarify something, all Bell had to do is to accept the order that we placed online, show up today and install it and we’d be happy. But they didn’t so that’s why we’ll never deal with Bell again.

This entry was posted on July 31, 2021 at 12:08 pm and is filed under Commentary with tags Bell, 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.