The IT Nerd

I’ve been musing how Rogers might dig itself out of the July outage that brought the country to a standstill. And what seems to be happening is that Rogers is on a full court press to make the case that they can and will do better. Which is where this post on the Rogers website comes in which was posted yesterday. Let’s start with the video that was posted along with a large amount of verbiage:

Okay…. Rogers says that they’re “committed to Canadians”. That seems almost sincere. Yes that’s sarcasm. But let’s hit the highlights from the post which you can read in full at your leisure:

• Rogers wants to ensure that 911 services work 100% of the time. That’s something that I always thought was a given until the July outage left people on the Rogers network unable to call 911. Which is the ultimate #Fail if you are a telco.
• Rogers is going to spend $20 billion on network reliability. I question where they are going to get the cash to do that seeing as that they are having to borrow money to buy Shaw Communications. And they’re going back to their lenders to extend the deadline to get the deal done. So based on that, where are they getting the money to make their network more reliable? Your cable bill perhaps? Seriously, inquiring minds want to know. Also, the cynic in me wonders how bad their network must be for them to feel the need to spend $20 billion. Which is up from the $10 billion that Rogers previously promised to spend. The cynic in me also says that they are just throwing a bigger number out there hoping that it will stick because the last big number that they tossed out there didn’t stick.
• Rogers touted their 100% Canadian call centres, which is a clear shot at Bell who are known to outsource and offshore their call centres, and via that say that they will deliver the best customer experience to Canadians. That part I will buy into because Rogers has always had a better customer experience than Bell. They also want to increase their customer satisfaction as well. Seeing as that likely took a dive because of the July outage.
• Rogers then goes on to talk about their charitable work, closing the digital divide etc. All to give you the warm fuzzies.

Now all of this is nice. But I have to wonder if Canadians are willing to commit to Rogers as much as Rogers wants to commit to them? I say that because I was tipped off to this post by a mix of readers of this blog and clients of mine. And 100% of them didn’t believe a word that was being communicated in this post. They just see it as damage control with the more cynical suggesting that Rogers was grasping at straws because customers were likely fleeing for the competition en masse because of the July outage. I have no inside information to confirm or deny that. But I for one will be extremely interested to see what their churn rate is for the current quarter as that will tell all.

I’m digressing here.

The point is that if two dozen people who pinged me on this didn’t buy what Rogers was communicating, chances are the public at large isn’t buying this either and this attempt by Rogers to “earn back your trust” to use their words likely has fallen flat. And that’s going to be a huge problem for this troubled telco as it tries to rebuild what’s left of their reputation.

It sucks to be Rogers right now.

This entry was posted on August 24, 2022 at 9:10 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.