The IT Nerd

Frequent readers will know that I will praise Bell for the tech that they offer customers. But at the same time, I will criticize them for their customer service. More specifically how bad it is. This isn’t a new complaint. But this story that popped up last week really highlights how bad Bell’s customer service is. The top line headline is that Bell has been ordered to pay a Montreal customer $1000 for bad customer service:

A Quebec Court judge has ordered Bell Canada to pay a Montreal customer $1,000 after ruling he was subject to a “Kafkaesque” experience while trying to cancel his satellite television plan.

In a recent ruling, Judge Luc Huppé denounced how the man was given the runaround after contacting Bell’s customer service in the spring of 2019.

“Requiring a customer to endure a 75-minute telephone conversation in order to resolve a problem that, on the surface, seems relatively simple creates undue inconvenience,” Huppé ruled.

If you read the details of what this customer went through, it really sounds horrific. No customer should ever have to go through that. And I have to admit that I have experienced Bell’s bad customer service first hand. So while I am horrified by the experience, I am not surprised. And I will repeat something that I have previously said in the when I had my rather bad customer experience: 

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 was until their outage issues forced us to Bell. But to be clear, if Rogers somehow is able to get their act together and come 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.

I am bringing my negative experience up because that experience was two years ago, which if you consider that this customer’s experience was in 2019 strongly suggests that Bell has not fixed anything when it comes to customer service. That really reflects poorly on Bell. And it’s beyond time that Bell actually start doing something about addressing their customer service issues. Because experiences like the one that this customer had should never, ever happen.

This entry was posted on July 14, 2024 at 8:56 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.