The Commission for Complaints for Telecom-television Services (CCTS) has published its comprehensive 2022-23 Annual Report. And this report is very bad news for Rogers as they number one when it comes to complaints. But there are other issues that the report highlights:
Among the highlights in this year’s Annual Report:
- Rogers takes the lead in consumer complaints: For the first time in the CCTS’ 15-year history, Rogers leads the list of most complained-about service providers, with approximately 20% of 14,617 complaints accepted by the CCTS. Disclosure issues, billing errors and complaints about promised credits or refunds not being applied are the top issues raised by Rogers’ customers. Rogers’ customers also raised more issues about the quality of their telecom services and complete loss of their telecom services. Bell and TELUS follow Rogers on the list of most complained-about service providers.
- Customers are experiencing significant service performance problems, and outage complaints are on the rise: Quality of services remain a top concern for customers. Notably, complaints from customers experiencing a complete loss of service increased – with 93% more issues reported by wireless customers and 48% more issues from Internet customers.
- Contracts are unclear and missing important information: Customers continue to raise concerns about the clarity of information provided by service providers in their contracts, promotions, and related documents. Each year, telecom and TV customers raise issues about ‘mismatches’ between what they expect to receive and what’s received, not being aware of contract details or promotion details and providing consent to account changes.
- Complaints about roaming charges doubled for the second consecutive year: This increase reflects instances where customers report incorrect charges from their service provider for use of wireless services outside of a defined local coverage
- Emerging trends — cancellation and porting issues: This year, customers raised more issues with leaving or switching their service providers because they were unable to cancel their wireless or internet services or unable to port (transfer) their phone services to another provider. In some cases, this was due to the provider’s refusal, or because of system errors.
The fact that Rogers has had such an increase in complaints to take it to number one in that category isn’t good for the telco. And it matches things that I have been hearing about Rogers lately. All of which are negative. Clearly they have work to do when it comes to serving their customer base.
Besides Rogers coming out on the wrong end of this report, roaming issues are clearly an issue. Along with the fact that customers feel like they lack the info that they need to make decisions about their telco services. There’s a lot here and hopefully Canadian telcos are reading this and taking this report seriously. Because right now Canadian telcos aren’t being painted in the best light because of this report. Not that anyone in Canada is shocked by that.