The IT Nerd

Since I posted this story on a negative experience that a customer of mine recently had with Rogers, I’ve gotten a lot of e-mail and the odd Tweet on the subject. More on that in a bit. But in any case, I figured that I owed you an update as to what’s happened.

Since my original story, my customer connected with Rogers and they were able to make everything work after they presumably fixed whatever was wrong on their end. That’s where the good news ends when it comes to this interaction. I say that because Rogers then offered my client a whole six dollars in compensation. Keep in mind that when this first happened, they offered $60 which accounted for a month of Internet service for her. But not anywhere close to what I charge per hour. So clearly that was a fail as evidenced by this sentence in the e-mail that she sent me regarding this:

It always amazes me how long these things take and how Rogers does not put value on the customer’s time.

Top tip for those who are in customer facing positions. You have to be mindful of the customers time and respect that they have better things to do than to talk to a person in a customer service position. Now, I’m not degrading anyone who is in that line of work. What I am saying is that the best strategy for those in that line of work is to get the issues that are brought to them resolved to the customer’s satisfaction as quickly as possible in the first interaction. By doing that, you will respect the customer’s time.

Now that was before the Victoria Day holiday in Canada. Yesterday evening I got an update from my client. She spoke to Rogers Office Of The President which in Rogers speak is a customer experience team that exists to deal with escalated situations and resolve them by utilizing any and all resources that Rogers has at their disposal so that they retain the customer. In my client’s case, here’s what they did for her:

• They credited her the equivalent of two months Internet service.
• She also was having intermittent cable TV issues which they added a $50 credit to the mix.
• She finally got the six dollar credit from the rep that she spoke to so that she could get her e-mail working.

That’s enough for my client to stay with Rogers for now. Whether she is still a Rogers customer a few months from now is a bit of an open question.

Now, this should be the part where I should say thank you to Rogers for stepping in and helping to resolve this. While I will do that as once she got into the right hands, things started to move in a positive direction, I will also say this. If you look the issues that I’ve had with Rogers Internet where the first time I had issues, Rogers had to hop through hoops to to resolve those issues after I posted to social media and got escalated to The Office Of The President. Then look at the second time that I had issues with my Internet and Rogers, and again I posted to social media and got escalated to The Office Of The President to get my issues resolved, and combine that with this specific experience where I posted to social media and my client got escalated to The Office Of The President to get her issues resolved, you come to this conclusion. Rogers customer service has some serious issues that are really impacting them in a negative way.

The fact is that using social media as a means to escalate so that you can get an issue resolved should be an exception. However, with Rogers it seems to be the rule. And the fact that my original story got a insane amount of page views and e-mails detailing a variety of Rogers customer service fails shows that I am not the only person who thinks that. Take this person for example who reached out to me today on Twitter:

This was my answer:

I gave that advice because Bell is hyper aggressive about stealing every Rogers customer that they can as from personal experience I can say that they sense an opportunity to hurt Rogers. Plus, they appear to have upped their game when it comes to TV and Internet services. In the case of the latter, Bell has an exceptionally good Internet offering. On top of that they have attractive introductory pricing (where the first few months are at a discounted rate and then it goes to whatever their normal rate is if you get a bundle of services) that makes it worth ones while to consider switching to them. If Bell can bring better customer service to the table than what Rogers currently offers, then Rogers is in very deep trouble.

Rogers new CEO is a fellow named Joe Natale who is best known for his work at Telus to up their customer service game. By the time he left, Telus was the top of the food chain when it came to customer service. If I had any advice for him, I would say that he needs to focus on turning Rogers customer service from being something that makes customers want to leave the telco, to something that is core to them retaining customers. And he needs to do it quickly. Because as evidenced by this experience by my client, they aren’t doing nearly enough to send a message that Rogers values their business and it is worth being a customer of theirs.

I just got home from seeing a client who had a very negative experience with Rogers. Now, this isn’t my first time helping a customer to deal with Rogers, but this one was the worst experiences I’ve had. It started when my customer got this email from Rogers:

She attempted to go through the process at the website referenced above, but she ran into trouble. She couldn’t recall what her e-mail password was and the password that she had on file didn’t work. On top of that, when she tried to reset her password at that same website, it said that it could not retrieve her secret question.

So she phoned me. I arrived at the client’s house at 5:30 PM, and after ten minutes of troubleshooting I figured that we needed to do is to phone Rogers. So we did at the number that is in the above e-mail and got through to a technical support rep quickly. He verified some information with my client and then came to the conclusion that because her Rogers e-mail account was so old, it didn’t have a security question which is why the instructions in the above wouldn’t work. He then figured that the fix to this would be to reset the password. He did so and asked us to log into the Yahoo web email portal (as Rogers has an association with Yahoo for email) to verify that it work. He then declared things fixed and hung up.

They weren’t fixed.

Not only could she still not follow the instructions above, but now she was unable to receive e-mail in Microsoft Outlook. However she could send e-mail. Prior to the actions of that tech, Outlook worked perfectly. Thus it was a second call to Rogers. The person we got listened to what we had to say, but she was unable to help. She did some basic troubleshooting, but this was clearly above her head. So she transferred us to Rogers TechXpert who she claimed could solve her problem. After a ten minute wait, we got to a TechXpert tech who again listened to what we had to say, and then used a remote access tool to remote into the computer to do the following:

1. Look at Microsoft Outlook and see what errors we were getting.
2. Testing the account name and password in the Yahoo web email portal. That worked.
3. Trying to walk through the process that was in the email above with no success.

At that point that so called TechXpert escalated to another TechXpert. Here’s where things get weird. Instead of putting that person on the phone with us, she transferred the remote control session to her and hung up the phone. Whatever would happen next would happen via us communicating with this TechXpert via a chat window in the remote access application.

Let me stop here and comment on this. A chat window in a remote access application is the most inefficient way to troubleshoot any sort of issue. Why they went this route is mind boggling and I would never recommend that any of the contact centers that I consult for would ever go this route. What should have happened is that they should have remained on the phone with us. Clearly Rogers doesn’t see things that way.

In any case, we watched as this second TechXpert did the same steps as the first one with the same results. At the end of it the TechXpert gave us and told us that she would need to create a ticket and get back to us in 24 to 48 hours. We got the ticket number and the TechXpert disconnected from the computer.

It was now 6:30 PM and my customer was far from happy with Rogers as she walked into this with working e-mail and she now doesn’t have e-mail that works with Outlook. That is a #fail. I decided to see if I could do something else to help her. Since Rogers has a presence on Twitter, I decided to try that by reaching out to them during the attempts of the second TechXpert to help:

Rogers responded and after a few Tweets back and forth, they instructed us to do this:

So she dialed the number in question as she was not on any form of social media and got another tech on line. Now I will give him credit. He tried his best over the next 30 minutes to try and do something for her, but to no avail. He said that he’d have to file a ticket and get back to us in 24 t0 48 hours. That was something that was a bridge too far for my client and she demanded to speak to a manager. After another 10 minutes we got a manager. In short, his stance was that people had already filed tickets and things were going to get fixed. However because she was a customer of Rogers since the mid 2000’s, he originally a “make good” of $50. Then he offered up a free month which for my client was $60. That wasn’t good enough for her seeing as she had to hire me to support her in a situation that she should never had been in. One other thing happened. Via talking to this manager, we discovered that he had no documentation about our very first interaction at 5:40 PM. That caused my client to explode. Clearly some of Rogers employees don’t care enough about their customers to properly document their interactions with Rogers customers. That’s something that I discovered when one of my interactions with Rogers went sideways. The manager was at first insistent that we were wrong, and then backed down from that and apologized for our experience. In the end, my client refused the offers this manager was making and ended the call.

During this interaction, I pleaded with Rogers to help via Twitter.

Now I could understand their stance. There are privacy issues at play and I applaud them for enforcing that. I then tried a different approach to get her some help. Here’s their response:

It blows my mind that you have customer who is so frustrated that they were looking at the Bell website while talking to various Rogers employees who are unable to solve her core issue wouldn’t think outside the box to help this person in some way. In fact, this next Tweet illustrate Rogers inability to think outside the box:

Well….. I’m pretty sure that’s not going to happen given all of the above. When she saw that Tweet, she declared that Rogers didn’t care. I then typed this back:

Total time invested: Three hours.

Here’s the core issue. Rogers wants its customers to be secure. That’s noble. However this customer had issues and nobody could troubleshoot a problem that was Rogers responsibility and resolve it in a timely manner. Plus she had to hire me to help which given that Rogers is one of Canada’s largest teclcos should never, ever happen. On top of that when I reached out for help on Twitter, the only medium that they were willing to help was on Twitter and Facebook. This is an all around #EpicFail and shows that Rogers really needs to do something about the customer service that they provide. Because, they took a customer who has been a with Rogers since the mid 2000’s, and put them on the path of of leaving Rogers for Bell.

That’s pretty sad.

Rogers could rescue this situation if they stepped up and accept responsibility for the fact that this customer went through a ton of hoops that she didn’t need to and solve her issue to her satisfaction. Then they need to work out some way to make good that is equal to the the hassle that she’s been through. If they did that, I think that she’d stay a Rogers customer. But I honestly don’t think that is going to happen. What I think will happen is that Rogers will fix this password issue, her e-mail will work in Outlook, and she’ll move to Bell in a month or two. Though I’m open to being proven wrong.

Rogers, over to you.

UPDATE: I put up this story on Twitter and on the blog and it took FOUR MINUTES for Rogers to respond:

I responded with this:

Rogers responded with this:

I did so and got a response that my client will be contacted within 24 hours. I’ll be watching to make sure that happens. Updates as they come.

UPDATE #2: There is an update to this story here.

Let me bring you up to speed with my latest issue with Rogers Ignite Gigabit Internet. After I posted the original story, my issue got escalated to the Office Of The President at Rogers. That means that my issue was being taken seriously by Rogers. That might have something to do with:

A) My profile as a blogger.

B) The fact that I was considering bolting to Bell to get decent Internet service.

C) All of the above.

Now the person that I was dealing with was extremely responsive and attentive. I will give him points for that. However, I am not sure if he had to do much. I say that because during this period, Rogers had two serious outages. And I do mean serious. Now once they were resolved, things actually improved greatly and my connection was almost back to normal. But it wasn’t totally normal as I still suffer from the occasional lag spike that is short lived. As in lasting for just a second or two. But even that was a huge improvement over what I was dealing with before, thus I can live with that. But this wasn’t there before Rogers rather problematic rollout of DOCSIS 3.1 which I have documented here since late last year. Thus it is safe to say that Rogers still has a lot of work to do before I consistently get the service that I am paying for, and I had previous to that rollout.

Speaking of paying, the upshot of this experience was that the Office of The President dropped the cost of our TV, Internet and home phone from $195 a month to $155 a month until April 2019. This is a $40 reduction that they served up because according to them my wife and I were long standing customers of Rogers and they appreciate our business. The cynic in me also thinks that this is due to the fact that we were thinking of bolting to Bell because of these Internet issues and this is a way to keep us from doing that. But whatever the reason, we’ll take it. Lower telco costs in Canada are always a good thing as Canadians pay way too much in the first place for their telco services. Having said that, it’s not going to stop us from bolting if we continue to have issues in the future as we’ve tried out Bell’s Fibe Gigabit Internet in our friends units, and it is very tempting to switch to that because of the speed it offers both upstream and downstream and the fact it according to my tests offers a very low latency connection to the Internet.

Rogers clearly has issues with their Ignite Internet service and their rollout of DOCSIS 3.1. A quick look at places like Red Flag Deals, DSLReports, and even their own Rogers community forums illustrate this. They really need to get a handle on this and quickly. Otherwise the bad press that issues like these generate will simply mount to the point where it will be difficult for them to get customers in areas where Bell offers a competitive product. And even in areas where they don’t have to worry about Bell. I’m sure Rogers and their shareholders don’t want that. Thus they may want to redouble their efforts to have a stable and reliable Internet offering.

Last night Rogers had a major outage that affected all of Southern Ontario and some points beyond where users could not surf the Internet Intermittently and there were significant ping times and a large amount of packet loss. The issue was thought to have been fixed this morning:

Apparently it isn’t fixed. Reports are once again coming in of people complaining of the same issues that they were complaining about last night. DSLReports and Canadianoutages.com are tracking an uptick in reports of issues. For example, the latter not only has a graph of the volume of issues:

But their live outage map looks similar to the one from last night:

While the volume of complaints isn’t nearly as high as last night, there clearly is still an issue that has enough scale to it that it is difficult to miss. So Rogers declaring the issue as fixed is clearly premature. I will be tracking this story and provide updates as I get them. In the meantime, I hope Rogers has a plan to bring back full functionality for their Internet users quickly and completely as I can say that based on the feedback that I am getting directly and what I am seeing online, there are a lot of very unhappy campers out there right now.

UPDATE: The latest issue appears to be resolved as of 2:30PM. I seem to have no issues at present. But there are still scattered reports of issues.

Rogers appears to have widespread and severe issues across Southern Ontario where Ignite Internet users are intermittently unable to surf the Internet and ping rates that are through the roof. Reports first surfaced on DSLReports of this at 5PM and were later confirmed by Canadian Outages as per this map that I took a screen shot of:

That is not a small piece of real estate. I can confirm that these problems exist and they are serious. As I type this, Rogers appears to not be admitting that they have an issue despite the fact that they clearly do. This will only add to the frustration of Rogers users who have suffered through their rather problematic rollout of DOCSIS 3.1 which I have documented here since late last year. Myself included.

Updates as they come.

UPDATE: A reader pointed me towards this Tweet where Rogers seems to be admitting that there is a problem. But they seem to be minimizing the impact:

UPDATE #2: According to a post on DSLReports, this appears to have started at 1:45PM. I took a screen shot of the post in question where you can see when the trouble began:

UPDATE #3: Rogers has finally publicly admitted on their Twitter feed that there is an issue:

UPDATE #4: At 3:30 AM this morning (Friday March 10th) the issue was apparently resolved. A modem reboot may be required to restore full functionality. But based on the e-mails and the odd Tweet that I have received, this might have been the last straw for Rogers customers who have been frustrated with issues that the provider has had over the last couple of months. Rogers retention department is going to be a very busy place today I suspect.

UPDATE #5: This appears to not be fixed. Please click here for a new story on this issue.

I have been following Rogers rather problematic rollout of DOCSIS 3.1 which I have documented here since late last year, and I have more than a passing interest in this subject. DOCSIS 3.1 was supposed to help Rogers pave the way to provide gigabit and faster speeds when it comes to its Internet offering. However, all its managed to do is cause frustration for their users. A quick look at places like Red Flag Deals, DSLReports, and even the Rogers community forums show that users who mostly have Gigabit along with others at lower speed tiers complain about not being able to get anywhere close to the speeds that they should. Another thing that many complain about is lag. In fact, I am in that boat as I note it when I play online games, use a VPN, or do video conferencing. My wife noticed the same thing while doing a video conference last week and it was so frustrating to her, she demanded that I do something about it.

Now we know that people in our condo who get Bell’s Gigabit Fibe service are getting at worst the 1Gbps down and 100Mbps that Bell claims that they should get. In most cases, they’re actually getting more. Plus they don’t report the sort of issues that Rogers customers seem to be getting. In other words, it seems that Bell Fibe Gigabit is a much more stable and mature product versus what Rogers offers. Now I am not a fan of Bell as I have had some very negative interactions with them in the past. But given just how frustrated my wife and I are with Rogers, we were willing to give their Internet offering a try. So I started to investigate what it would cost to get Internet from Bell so that we could dump Rogers. But upon researching it, we found that it was difficult to get a price for just Internet alone as Bell wants to push you down the road of getting a bundle. Since we wanted to just get our Internet from them, I decided to Tweet them to see if that was a possibility:

I got a reply very quickly from Bell to set up a direct message session. But I also got this reply from Rogers:

So after dealing with Bell and getting a quote from them which on the surface, is in line with what Rogers pricing is, I responded to Rogers and have a long conversation about the state of my Internet connection. Long story short, he promised to get a network architect to look at my connection. That took a couple of days, which given that I had already expressed my desire to take my Internet business elsewhere may not have been the best thing for them, but when they finally came back to me they said this (please note that I have copied and pasted this directly from Twitter…. Thus I have left everything the way it was written):

We’ve now thoroughly investigated this issue and it’s come to light that there may be signal issues within the area. Your signal varies wildly and thhe uplink signal is off spec for one channel. We’re also seeing a large number of packets being discarded or errored. We would like to send out a tech to investigate and if need be, he will make a referral to maintenance to have the area issues repaired.

Well. That would explain why my connection lags a lot. I agreed to have a tech look at it and made an appointment for this past Saturday. Which didn’t actually lead to any resolution. Even before taking a look at my connection, he said:

This building is a mess. You’ll note that we’re here every day because things are so bad with this building. I’ll take a look at your connection, but if it’s like everything else that is going on with this building, only head office can fix your issues. 

Now let’s stop here and think about this for a second. If I as a customer hear something like this, I am going to be thinking “why am I with this company?” After all, it’s Rogers that provides the infrastructure, and Rogers who maintains it. Thus if things are a “mess” that’s totally on Rogers because they should be making sure that their infrastructure works and doesn’t cause issues for their customers. Clearly that is not the case. In any case, he did take a look at my connection and confirm the diagnosis that was made remotely. He did promise to make some changes from the “Rogers Box” that feeds this building to see if that would help, but he didn’t think it would. For that he would have to request that someone at head office address this, and it may take 48 hours or more to happen.

And then he left.

I watched my TV go flaky for about 30 minutes, which was an indication that he was doing some work downstairs. But when it finally settled down, there was no real change to the quality of my Internet connection. It was still as laggy as ever. #Fail.

Honestly, my wife and I to the point where Bell as much as we aren’t fans of them are a viable option at this point. We have zero confidence that Rogers are going to resolve this issue any time soon. Thus seeing as Bell are in our building offering deals to get us to switch from Rogers, we’ll be taking a good hard look at them the next time they appear. But at the same time, I have a request. If you’ve got Bell Gigabit Fibe, can I get some feedback from you as to what your experiences have been like? The good, the bad, the ugly? I want to make sure that we’re not trading one problem for another by doing this. Please leave a comment below with your thoughts. In the meantime, expect updates on this story as this is far from over.

UPDATE: I should have pointed out this is our second go round in terms of trying to get decent quality Internet from Rogers. Here’s what happened the first time, and what Rogers had to do to resolve those issues.