The IT Nerd

I’ve written about Bell’s customer service issues in the past. For example when I was a customer of their’s (technically I still am as my ISP of the moment is Distributel which is owned by Bell) I had this incident. Or this incident. But at the same time, this incident highlighted the fact that Bell is capable of stepping up and providing good customer service.

Today I’m going to tell you about a client of mine who is on the negative side of this. It stated last week when she phoned me to ask me to visit her home to troubleshoot a TV issue. This client has Bell for home phone, Internet, TV and cellular, and she couldn’t watch TV. When I arrived I quickly determined that the Bell TV box wasn’t connecting to her Gigahub, which is Bell’s name for their modem that connects you with their fibre optic service known as Fibe. Taking a look at the Gigahub, it appeared to be frozen. No problem I thought. I will reboot it and all should be right with the universe. Except unplugging it and plugging it back in resulted in a reboot loop. As it it would constantly reboot. That implied that the Gigahub was faulty. So since this client is a senior, she asked to help her talk to Bell to get this fixed. So she dialled them, verified her identity using her PIN along with a bunch of other information and then let me take control of the call to troubleshoot this with Bell. Long story short, it was determined that the Gigahub was faulty. The person on the other end of the line claimed that a new one would be sent out by FedEx or Purolator Courier preconfigured and would arrive the next day.

Now my Spidey Sense went off as I have never heard of Bell shipping replacement modems of any kind that quickly. But I dismissed that as I thought that maybe Bell had stepped up their game. I then asked the client to call or email me when the modem arrived, I would do the modem swap and drop off the old modem with whatever courier company Bell used to ship it to her.

The next day the modem didn’t arrive as Bell promised. I honestly wasn’t surprised by that. And when the client checked in with Bell to see what the problem was…. I’ll let her tell you in her own words via the email that she sent me:

So no delivery of a Bell box…. Such a nuisance!

What’s the next step?

I asked her to phone Bell. And she did. This was the next email that I got:

So…. Eventually it turns out that the order is in for a new modem but that it takes 2-3 business days… 

So we’ll see…

Cheers 

Now this sounds like the Bell that I am used to dealing with. It also meant that the guy that we spoke to together lied.

Sidebar: In my opinion, companies who provide customer facing support as part of their product offering need to aggressively monitor every employee they have to ensure that any bad actors are found and eliminated. And conversely any excellent employees are found, praised, and rewarded for the good work. That way you create a culture where providing excellent customer service is the only behaviour that is acceptable. I suspect Bell doesn’t do this at all, or as aggressively as they should because if this guy is on their payroll or part of an company that they outsource to and is able to lie to customers, it’s highly likely that other people exist within Bell or whatever company they outsource to who also do the same thing as they think that their odds of getting caught are low.

Unfortunately, things only get worse from here. I followed up with her a couple of days later when I didn’t hear from her and got this response:

So the saga continues…. No orders were put in.. I tried Sat and this am.

So I’m trying to dismantle the modem in order to return it to a Bell store (50 Bloor)

I can’t dislodge the cable.

Could you possibly swing by to do that?

The cable that she was referring to was the fibre optic cable. I was working with another client at the time and didn’t see this email until a couple of hours had passed, and by that point she got her son to come over to remove the cable. Hopefully not breaking it as fibre optic cables are fragile. But now we’ve moved from a situation where the new modem which the Bell rep said would arrive the next day, to one where the modem would arrive in two or three days, to one where an order for a new modem was never put in which forces a senior to take the old modem to a Bell store in hopes of getting a replacement.

Now the story does get better. Sort of. She did return the modem to the store after removing the cable. And then three days later a new modem did arrive and her son was able to help her to set it up. But the whole experience left her frustrated and upset and reconsidering if she should continue her relationship with Bell.

The thing is, negative experiences with Bell seem to be a common thing these days. Besides this report from the CCTS where complaints about Bell are not only up massively, but are second only to Rogers as well. And a browse of the Bell SubReddit seems to validate that Bell isn’t in a good place when it comes to customer service. Take this example, or this example, or this example. Now to be fair to Bell, these are a handful of examples that I found in five minutes of browsing on Reddit. But my counter argument to that is that if you accept that only a handful of people complain about service in public, there are many others who complain in places other than Reddit. And if you’re Bell, you should be very, very concerned.

Now Bell hasn’t posted its quarterly numbers yet. But last quarter it lost money which is absolutely mind blowing to me as Bell as long as I have been alive has just made money simply by existing. One factor in them losing money was this:

BCE added 33,111 net postpaid mobile phone subscribers, down 76.8 per cent from the same period last year, which was the company’s second-best performance on the metric since 2010.

It said the drop was driven by higher customer churn — a measure of subscribers who cancelled their service — amid greater competition and promotional offers. BCE’s monthly churn rate for the category was 1.28 per cent, up from 1.1 per cent during its previous third quarter.

“I’m not happy with where churn is. I don’t think anyone would be given the numbers,” said Bibic, adding the company is coping with “what’s arguably been the most competitively intense market we’ve seen.”

“It is a marketplace reality that consumers are continuing to shop for deals given the sustained, aggressive promotional offers that are in the marketplace. So because of that, you’re going to see a lot of switching activity.”

BCE also saw 11.6 per cent fewer gross subscriber activations. Bell’s wireless mobile phone average revenue per user (ARPU) was $58.26, down 3.4 per cent from $60.28 in the third quarter of the prior year.

This isn’t a good situation for Bell. But you fix a situation like this by having a good product at a fair price with good customer service to back it up. If Bell is going to improve their fortunes, they need to improve on all these fronts. Especially customer service. Because without that, the first two don’t matter.

Let’s see if they’re able to do that over the near term. I don’t think they can, but as always, I am free to be surprised.