The IT Nerd

A quick recap in case you are coming to this story late.

My wife and I wanted to save some money on our telco services. And at the same time we wanted to get some extra speed as Bell offers the fastest Internet speed available. So the original plan was to move to Bell and use their Fibe product. But our attempt to do that went off the rails very quickly when we tried to order their services online for next day installation. And then to add insult to injury, they then very aggressively tried to upsell us at the same time.

Total #Fail.

After pulling the plug on Bell because of their lack of customer focus, we ordered an upgrade kit to make the move to Rogers Ignite. By going to Ignite, we would save about $80 a month. We ordered the kit on a Saturday afternoon online, and we got it on Sunday morning. That blew our minds. And the install was almost painless. The only thing that didn’t go to plan was the install of Rogers Home Phone. But Rogers got that sorted in about an hour after I called them. Now I have done a couple of follow ups on their Ignite IPTV box and their Ignite WiFi Hub that doubles as a gateway for your home phone. All those services have not only worked flawlessly, but the downstream speed of my Internet connection is above Gigabit speeds. All that has been very positive. The only thing was outstanding was billing. Now in our previous interactions with Rogers, when my wife and I tend to make a change with, the billing will get screwed up. That means we’d have to spend time and effort to fix that. And as a result we end up frustrated with Rogers

That didn’t happen this time. All the billing changes happened transparently in the background without any intervention on the part of my wife or I. Now we did note that we had two TV boxes on our Rogers account for about 10 days or so, but a call to Rogers (which required a 16 minute hold to speak to a human which is a bit of a #fail) put our mind at ease on that front. The Rogers rep that we spoke to explained that we were still in the middle of a billing cycle which is why two TV boxes were on our account. Once we rolled over to the next billing cycle, the old TV box would disappear. And it did right when they said it would.

In other words, this went almost perfectly.

Now I give Rogers a lot of criticism. For example, I have been very critical of them not having Internet services that compete with Bell, or Telus for that matter when it comes to speed. But this transition to Rogers Ignite has been pretty much painless on almost every front. Shockingly so in fact. And Rogers customer service has been top shelf. What my wife and I learned was that while Rogers has some serious work to do to offer services that fully compete with Bell, Rogers customer experience absolutely destroys Bell’s customer experience. And a extremely positive customer experience is often more than enough to make up for not being the best guy on the block. Which in terms of their Internet offering, Rogers isn’t. So I would like to give kudos to Rogers for making this a very positive experience. Though at the same time I will say that Rogers needs to quickly do something about the fact that their flagship Internet plan is Gigabit downstream and 30 Mbps upstream which is simply not anything close to being competitive in 2021 when Bell is offering Gigabit downstream and 750 Mbps upstream, or even 1.5 Gigabit downstream and 940 Mbps upstream.

Finally, a quick word for Bell. You had a chance to steal a Rogers customer because your Internet services are fast. And we were even willing to look past the negative interactions that we have had with you in the past because the services that you offer are fast. But your customer experience not only sent us running back to Rogers, but for the foreseeable future we aren’t planning on leaving Rogers because they way you treat your customers is simply shambolic. If you want to change that, you need to prove that you won’t make your customers feel like they have spent time in a high pressure car dealership and that they need a shower afterwards because the slime factor was so high. Now my wife and I don’t think that you’re up to the challenge. But we are free to not only be surprised, but we are open to discussing this with you so that you can understand why we feel the way we do. Not that we expect you to reach out because we know that you’ve read the posts related to this story, and you haven’t reached out despite the fact that our contact info is very easy to find. That likely tells us all that we need to know Bell as an organization and what Bell thinks of their customers. An organization that is customer focused wants to hear about the things that go wrong so that they can improve the customer experience. And it appears that Bell isn’t that sort of organization because they appear that they could care less. Thus we’re not holding our collective breath in terms of anyone from Bell contacting us.

In the meantime, my wife and I will go back to enjoying Rogers Ignite. It may be slower than what Bell offers, but the customer experience that Rogers offers is far better. Which is why it’s in our home at the moment.

This entry was posted on August 17, 2021 at 9:05 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.