Stop Me If You’ve Heard This Before…. Bell Canada Seriously Needs To Improve Their Customer Service
Something that has been a constant with my stories about Bell Canada has been the fact that they have a great product in terms of their fibre Internet offerings, but their customer service sucks. In fact, I have previously said this:
If I were Mirko Bibic the CEO of Bell, I’d be doing everything possible to improve the customer experience as my experience with their call centre reps was not that good. And improving the customer experience should include ending their practice of outsourcing and offshoring their customer service staff. I say that because Rogers doesn’t have outsourced and offshore staff, and their customer experience is far better than Bell’s. And that was enough for my wife and I to hang in with them despite the fact that their Internet offering was substandard in comparison to what Bell offers. That is until their outage issues forced us to Bell. But to be clear, if Rogers somehow is able to get their act together and comes up with an Internet offering that is actually competitive with Bell and actually reliable, and Rogers customer service continues to better than Bell, then they may have the means to lure us back. Because having great customer service is what matters. And right now, Bell doesn’t have that. At least not at the call centre level.
Yesterday was a great example of that. My wife complained to me that the Internet was slow. So like any good husband, I investigated this expecting to find that the Internet was fine and something was wrong with her iPhone which was the device that she was using. Expect the Internet was not fine based on this:
Something was seriously wrong with my download speed as it was abysmal. It wasn’t even 10% of the speed that I normally get as evidenced by the speed test from last October. The upload speed was more or less fine. So after rebooting my HH4000 a couple of times and not getting any change in speed, I called Bell. After punching my way through their phone system, I got an actual human who after I explained my issue to them, audibly signed and then promptly hung up on me.
Now this surprised me, but didn’t surprise me at the same time. It did surprise me as I expect that in 2023 that all calls in any call centre are recorded and a percentage of them are reviewed. And I would assume that when this call was reviewed, he should be as good as fired. But the fact that he hung up on me suggests that this specific agent either didn’t know that, or didn’t care because he was playing the odds that this call would not be reviewed. As for it didn’t surprise me part, I have heard stories like this before in places like Reddit as well as from some of my clients. Which is Bell call centre reps have a tendency to hang up on people. Either way, it tells you all you need about how seriously the employees of whatever call centre Bell contracts take their jobs. I’ll come back to that later.
Now I called back and once again punching my way through their phone system, I got a woman who after I explained my issue to them, and the fact that I was hung up on, took a very professional attitude in terms of trying to address this issue. She also apologized for the previous agent hanging up on me. After running some tests and confirming that my Internet speed was abysmally slow, she made some changes on her end which caused my HH4000 to reboot. What she likely did was push a new speed profile to the HH4000 so that it knew how fast it was supposed to be going. That implied that the profile that was on the modem was incorrect or messed up. After the modem came back up, she ran a few more tests along with yours truly and the problem was fixed.
Total time invested: 3 Minutes for the call where the agent hung up on me, and 16 minutes for the call where the issue was actually fixed.
Now this issue highlights the fact that Bell’s customer service can be great, or it can be crap. It’s simply luck of the draw based on the agent that you get. I’ve had good experiences with Bell’s customer service as evidenced here. But this was certainly a bad experience that worked itself out at the end of the day. And that’s Bell Canada’s major problem. Since Bell clearly does not have any control of whomever they outsource their customer service to, customers of Bell get a very uneven experience. And that experience can trend toward bad if you call them often enough. This needs to change because the only thing stopping Bell from completely destroying Rogers is the quality of their customer service. It needs to be consistently good so that customers know that when they call Bell, they will get the help that they need. And by consistently, I mean 100% of the time. That’s not happening right now. And even with Rogers bringing back jobs to Canada that Shaw outsourced to other countries, that’s not enough pressure for Bell to do the same thing. The fact that Rogers has done this means that Rogers has an advantage over Bell which is that they completely control the customer experience. As I said earlier, the fact that Rogers had great customer service was enough to keep us with them until their products became unreliable. Bell really needs to rethink how they deliver customer service because that’s the only thing that’s keeping them from wiping the floor with Rogers. And they need to get moving on that now.
This entry was posted on April 23, 2023 at 8:27 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.
Stop Me If You’ve Heard This Before…. Bell Canada Seriously Needs To Improve Their Customer Service
Something that has been a constant with my stories about Bell Canada has been the fact that they have a great product in terms of their fibre Internet offerings, but their customer service sucks. In fact, I have previously said this:
If I were Mirko Bibic the CEO of Bell, I’d be doing everything possible to improve the customer experience as my experience with their call centre reps was not that good. And improving the customer experience should include ending their practice of outsourcing and offshoring their customer service staff. I say that because Rogers doesn’t have outsourced and offshore staff, and their customer experience is far better than Bell’s. And that was enough for my wife and I to hang in with them despite the fact that their Internet offering was substandard in comparison to what Bell offers. That is until their outage issues forced us to Bell. But to be clear, if Rogers somehow is able to get their act together and comes up with an Internet offering that is actually competitive with Bell and actually reliable, and Rogers customer service continues to better than Bell, then they may have the means to lure us back. Because having great customer service is what matters. And right now, Bell doesn’t have that. At least not at the call centre level.
Yesterday was a great example of that. My wife complained to me that the Internet was slow. So like any good husband, I investigated this expecting to find that the Internet was fine and something was wrong with her iPhone which was the device that she was using. Expect the Internet was not fine based on this:
Something was seriously wrong with my download speed as it was abysmal. It wasn’t even 10% of the speed that I normally get as evidenced by the speed test from last October. The upload speed was more or less fine. So after rebooting my HH4000 a couple of times and not getting any change in speed, I called Bell. After punching my way through their phone system, I got an actual human who after I explained my issue to them, audibly signed and then promptly hung up on me.
Now this surprised me, but didn’t surprise me at the same time. It did surprise me as I expect that in 2023 that all calls in any call centre are recorded and a percentage of them are reviewed. And I would assume that when this call was reviewed, he should be as good as fired. But the fact that he hung up on me suggests that this specific agent either didn’t know that, or didn’t care because he was playing the odds that this call would not be reviewed. As for it didn’t surprise me part, I have heard stories like this before in places like Reddit as well as from some of my clients. Which is Bell call centre reps have a tendency to hang up on people. Either way, it tells you all you need about how seriously the employees of whatever call centre Bell contracts take their jobs. I’ll come back to that later.
Now I called back and once again punching my way through their phone system, I got a woman who after I explained my issue to them, and the fact that I was hung up on, took a very professional attitude in terms of trying to address this issue. She also apologized for the previous agent hanging up on me. After running some tests and confirming that my Internet speed was abysmally slow, she made some changes on her end which caused my HH4000 to reboot. What she likely did was push a new speed profile to the HH4000 so that it knew how fast it was supposed to be going. That implied that the profile that was on the modem was incorrect or messed up. After the modem came back up, she ran a few more tests along with yours truly and the problem was fixed.
Total time invested: 3 Minutes for the call where the agent hung up on me, and 16 minutes for the call where the issue was actually fixed.
Now this issue highlights the fact that Bell’s customer service can be great, or it can be crap. It’s simply luck of the draw based on the agent that you get. I’ve had good experiences with Bell’s customer service as evidenced here. But this was certainly a bad experience that worked itself out at the end of the day. And that’s Bell Canada’s major problem. Since Bell clearly does not have any control of whomever they outsource their customer service to, customers of Bell get a very uneven experience. And that experience can trend toward bad if you call them often enough. This needs to change because the only thing stopping Bell from completely destroying Rogers is the quality of their customer service. It needs to be consistently good so that customers know that when they call Bell, they will get the help that they need. And by consistently, I mean 100% of the time. That’s not happening right now. And even with Rogers bringing back jobs to Canada that Shaw outsourced to other countries, that’s not enough pressure for Bell to do the same thing. The fact that Rogers has done this means that Rogers has an advantage over Bell which is that they completely control the customer experience. As I said earlier, the fact that Rogers had great customer service was enough to keep us with them until their products became unreliable. Bell really needs to rethink how they deliver customer service because that’s the only thing that’s keeping them from wiping the floor with Rogers. And they need to get moving on that now.
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This entry was posted on April 23, 2023 at 8:27 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.