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Teksavvy Responds To My Posts About My DSL Repair Experience

Posted in Commentary with tags on September 6, 2013 by itnerd

It’s really easy for me to rant about a negative experience when I have an blog with the reach that it has. But what I try to do is to get the other side of the story as I feel that it’s important to give a balanced view of whatever the issue is that I’m writing about. Thus when I had my issues with my DSL connection and had it fixed a few days later, I wanted to put Teksavvy’s side of the story on the record. Today I got the chance to do that. I had the chance to speak to Tina Furlan who is Director of Marketing and Communications at TekSavvy, and it was a very enlightening conversation.

The core issue that led to the fact that my phone calls were never answered goes like this. Teksavvy gets it services from the incumbent telcos such as Bell or Rogers. So when a customer has a problem that Teksavvy cannot solve, they have to get their “partners” involved. One of their “partners” is not responding to Teksavvy’s requests for assistance in a timely manner. So their customers as a result keep calling and calling hoping for a resolution to whatever problem they have. That increases call volumes which in turn increases hold times. Add to that the fact that this is back to school time, which means that you have students activating Internet access in their dorm rooms and you have the perfect storm of less than optimal customer service.

Teksavvy is trying to address this in a variety of ways, starting with bringing on extra bodies. As I type this, they now have 500 people who are customer facing. That’s not a small number and it will help things. But from personal experience with the contact centers that I do consulting for, sheer numbers of people on the phones will mitigate but not solve the problem. That’s why the response times of their “partners” is crucial. Ms. Furlan noted that those response times are improving and their customers are getting back online faster. Every person who gets their needs addressed is one less person who calls into their call center. That makes things better for both Teksavvy and their customers.

Another thing that really helps the situation is the fact that they’ve been transparent with what’s going on. For example, if you go to the Teksavvy form on DSLReports.com you can see for yourself how open they’ve been. Take this thread for example where this is mentioned:

At TekSavvy we pride ourselves on delivering excellent customer service and so we are very concerned about the impact that any outages and service delays have on our customers, especially lengthy ones. We want to assure our customers that we have not been taking the situation lightly and have been working diligently to restore service. Since the 15th of August we have been working both directly and through counsel with the network operator to address the service affecting issues and we have also been employing the alternate dispute resolution services of the CRTC, all with a view to reaching the speediest resolution possible for the benefit of our customers. The details of the discussions must remain confidential in order for the various processes to be pursued in the most effective manner, but please rest assured that TekSavvy is fully and proactively engaged in seeking a resolution to the current problems.

Ms. Furlan also mentioned to me that their front line customer service agents can speak about their issues openly. That’s a bit of a shock for me as I don’t advise my customers to do that. I think I will have to rethink my views on that.

I want to thank Ms. Furlan for taking the time to speak to me about the issues that Teksavvy has had as well as being transparent with me. It’s really appreciated and helps me to deliver both sides of the issue to the readers of this blog.

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Wrapping Up My Teksavvy DSL Repair Experience

Posted in Commentary with tags on September 4, 2013 by itnerd

Now that I’ve had a couple of days digest having my DSL go flaky and what needed to be done to fix it. I can write this post with a clearer head.

Now there was some good that I did note in this experience. The Teksavvy tech that I spoke to at 11:18 PM who did everything he could to get me online was great and should be commended for that. Plus the Bell tech that came out was equally as great. He quickly identified my issue and resolved it and explained the issue in a way that was easy to understand.

Now the negative parts of this experience. There are some lessons to be learned here starting with the fact that this could have likely been avoided if Bell had tested my line properly when I got the initial upgrade. You might recall that when I got the upgrade, I said this:

A tech came up to my unit just before 2:30 to check to make sure that I had Internet access and what my speed was using speedtest.net.

Seriously.

The result that I got was within acceptable limits as in Canada, Internet access tends to be advertised as “up to” a given speed. If that’s why I had to be at home and cancel my appointments for the day. That’s kind of lame.

Perhaps if that tech did a bit more than just run speedtest.net on my computer, then this might have all been avoided. Since that didn’t happen, that meant I had to call Teksavvy. That’s when I noted the fact that Teksavvy had long hold times and answered Twitter faster than their phones. Now some of this can be explained by this story in the CBC where customers are having difficulty getting their needs addressed because of issues with Teksavvy suppliers. Namely Rogers whom the article implies is not responding to Teksavvy service requests, but is able to service their own customers just fine. I admit that this situation will send lots of callers into a call center, and they’ll keep coming back until their issue is resolved. But there appears to be more to this. In the process of researching this post, I came across this thread on DSLReports.com which notes the following:

We just hired 250 net additional staff. These problems are unprecedented. More ppl to answer the phone does not fix the problem. All you are doing is making a bad situation worse. It’s not that we don’t care or that we don’t want to answer the phone…

And this.

I guarantee you that once Rogers rolls out their new whatever it is they are working on by end of next month. Our wait times will be great. We, TekSavvy, are doing everything we should be doing. We’re not perfect but the vast majority of this is in Rogers hands and we are looking into that carefully.

So that implies that via Rogers and new staff, their hold time issues will be a thing of the past. But this is an assumption on my part as nobody from Teksavvy has contacted me with their side of this story as was promised in this Tweet:

I can only conclude that either they haven’t gotten around to getting back to me, or they don’t want to. If someone from Teksavvy does get back to me, I will post it here. If you don’t see a post with their side of the story, well, feel free draw whatever conclusions you will from that.

As for looking for a replacement telco, the search continues. I’ll update you when I have some closure on that front.

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My Sunday Part Two – A Fix For My Teksavvy DSL Issue

Posted in Commentary with tags , on September 1, 2013 by itnerd

So, after my server upgrade, I raced home to make sure that I was there when Bell arrived. Now my wife who is training for the Scotiabank Marathon managed to get home at 11:30 so that if Bell arrived at 12 (since the window was 12 – 6 PM) to fix the DSL issue that I spoke of here, there would be someone to meet them. Now I had done a fair amount of work to diagnose this issue and I kind of figured out why I was getting constant disconnects. Take a look at the screenshot below:

Untitled

This is a screenshot from my DSL modem. Most if not all DSL modems have the ability to log into it and pull up a page that displays all sorts of useful info, as long as you know what it means. I have highlighted a section called SNR margin. SNR stands for Signal To Noise Ratio. The lower that this number is, the more likely you are to have slow speed or stability issues. To give you an idea of what this number means, here’s a quick chart to give you an idea of what is good and bad:

  • 6dB or below is bad and you will experience no synch or intermittent synch problems
  • 7dB-10dB is fair but does not leave much room for variances in conditions
  • 11dB-20dB is good with no synch problems
  • 20dB-28dB is excellent
  • 29dB or above is outstanding

So I was basically at the floor. That explains why I was having constant disconnections. Now it was possible that my wiring was causing the issue, so as a troubleshooting step, I plugged my DSL modem into the RJ-11 jack that is the one that comes up from the telephone room in my condo (if you’re in a house, this will be the jack that is closest to where the telephone line enters your house). That is called the demarcation point. By plugging my modem into that jack with the shortest RJ-11 cable that you can find, It eliminates any internal wiring issues. I did that and got the same results as above. That way I was certain that this was a Bell issue.

Now bell had phoned just before 11AM to see if we were home (which we were not as my wife got back from her training run at 11:30) and when we got to about 3:30 PM and discovered that this had happened, and Bell hadn’t shown up, I called Teksavvy to see what the status was on my ticket with Bell. The guy I spoke to seemed more intent on troubleshooting my issue rather than simply looking into my ticket. That was really was weird. I put an end to it by e-mailing the above screen shot and explaining that the issue had been previously diagnosed, but I had had also come to the same conclusion based on the screen shot. Only then did he put me on hold to see what the status of my ticket was. Or at least he tried to as we got disconnected. But that didn’t matter as the Bell tech knocked on my door.

Now after I showed him the he walked over to the demarcation point and plugged a device to measure the SNR among other things. He didn’t like the numbers that he got so he called into Bell to get a line test and that uncovered the problem. My condo is roughly 3.7 kilometres from the Bell central office that my line is being fed from. The DSL profile that I was set up for was 16 megabits downstream and 1 megabits upstream. The problem with using that profile is that everything from the central office to my home is all copper. Pushing a profile of that speed over copper over that distance is a #fail and will never be stable because it will have a low SNR. Thus they had to change my profile to 12 megabits down and 1 megabits up. Here’s the net result:

Untitled 2

You’ll now notice that the SNR is up to over 7. Not the best, but it will be stable. That’s all I want. Now the profile change also means a speed drop. Prior to this, I was getting this via Speedtest.net:

This is the result after:

Now I can live with that because everything between 6 megabits downstream and 15 megabits downstream is the same price with Teksavvy. I can improve both the speed (to a degree) and the SNR by moving the modem to the demarcation point and running a long Ethernet cable from that point to my Apple Airport Extreme router. I’d have to use a UPS with the DSL modem as well since I want my Internet to be up during a blackout. I don’t have a spare one at the moment, so this will be a project for another day. Also of note, when the Bell tech (who was extremely nice by the way) was done, Teksavvy called back and I reported to them what had happened and what the fix was.

I’ll monitor this over the next few days to see if it stays stable, but I think that we’re in good shape from this point forward. I’ll wrap up my thoughts on this whole experience at a later date. Part of that included me reaching out to Teksavvy on Saturday for an interview as I wanted to get their side of the story. I reached out over Twitter to Andre Cleroux who is Teksavvy’s Director of Online & Operations Intelligence with this:

and he replied with this:

Points to him for responding. We’ll see if the interview actually happens or not.

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Teksavvy Long Hold Times – Not Good For Business [UPDATED x2]

Posted in Commentary with tags , on August 29, 2013 by itnerd

One of the things that I do is not only solve the technology challenges of businesses and individuals, but I also do call centre consulting. That is, a company will hire me to look at their call centre processes, technology and sometimes their staff, and I tell them how they can improve. If they want, I can then assist in the implementation of whatever plan we come up with. As a result of that I am sensitive, perhaps too sensitive to any call centre that can’t deliver customer service in a timely manner. Case in point, Teksavvy.

Yesterday at 6AM my wife woke up to us having no Internet, I did some troubleshooting including swapping my router and concluded that the issue was someplace other than our home as no matter what I did, the modem would sync up to the DSL network, but it would not connect. So I called Teksavvy. I got through to an agent in less than 5 minutes which I found odd given that it was 6AM and you’d think that at that time of the morning the response would be instant. But I dismissed that from my mind. The agent was very pleasant and she went about troubleshooting my issue. She first noted that I had been bumped off the Internet at about 1:30 AM and had not connected back in since. She also noted that I had a bit more noise than I should on my line which I noted as a problem, but it may not be the core issue. What was more of a problem is that nothing that we did would connect my DSL modem to the Teksavvy network despite the fact that it could get a DSL signal. She concluded that I must have a defective modem. That to me was a reasonable assumption since the modem was several years old. I suggested that the last time I had an issue like this it was a Bell problem. She was reluctant to open a ticket with Bell as if it wasn’t a Bell problem, it would cost me money (almost $88). Thus she suggested I exhaust other options like swapping the modem. She offered to keep the case open if I needed to call back. Foolishly I neglected to get a case number. But the flipside to that is that I train the customer service agents that I am hired to teach that you should always offer up a case number to the customer and let them decide if they want it or not. I dismissed that too as it was 6AM and she likely worked all night. After hanging up with her, I reset the modem to factory defaults, set it up again, and I was able to log in and surf the net. To me that sounded like a problematic modem. So I planned on getting one on my way home from my various client visits that day.

Fast forward to 5:30 PM. I got home with a new modem as well as new phone cable as I wanted to see if the phone cable was responsible for the noise on my line. I walked into my home office to find that the Internet was out again. So I figured that I should just replace the modem and the phone cable, so I did that and within 15 minutes I was up and running. Or so I thought. An hour later the Internet went down again. So I called Teksavvy and waited online for over an hour with nobody answering. Okay, so it was dinner time and it was likely one of their busy times. But an hour is just plain unacceptable. So when I was offered the option to leave a number for a call back, I took it. I left my number and hung up. Within 10 minutes the Internet was back. It stayed that way until 9PM when it went down again. So I called Teksavvy again. And once again I was on hold for over an hour. That’s when I decided to do what I did the last time I ran into a problem getting a hold of a live human being at Teksavvy. I resorted to Twitter. Since I was far from being a happy camper at the time, my Tweets were very pointed:

Just like the last time, I got a very quick response via Twitter and this conversation took place:

Here’s what’s wrong with this interaction thus far:

  1. I’ve called twice in the same evening and nobody ever picked up my call. The advice that I give my paying customers is that the gold standard of answering calls is 60 seconds or less. Answering calls that quickly makes any interaction easy to deal with for the customer service agent. Not only that, it scores a bonus point for the business. However, the reality is that unless you have a call center the size of a Rogers or Bell, you can’t do that. Even they have problems doing that at the best of times. Thus the next best thing is to get to callers in less than 10 minutes. Why 10 minutes? Simple. Most people are willing to wait that long and still have a positive feeling about the company they’re dealing with. The second the wait time crosses 10 minutes, that positive feeling declines rapidly. By the time the phone is picked up, the interaction between the customer service agent and the customer is going to be far less positive. Plus, if that is the experience that the customer gets time after time, they are far more likely to take their business elsewhere.
  2. The fact that Teksavvy answers Tweets faster than their phones is a problem. Twitter should supplement call center activities. In this case, Twitter is clearly being used to mitigate whatever issues Teksavvy has in their call center. That only works for so long before it becomes an issue that’s in the public eye. More on that in a second.

Back to my issue. Teksavvy called me back at 11:18 PM and started to look at my issue. After giving my customer information and re-explaining my issue to the agent that called back, he noted that my line stats were not good and I was on a DSL profile that was much lower than the speed of service that I was paying for.

For those who don’t speak nerd, here’s what I’m talking about: When you get DSL, the provider will give you a maximum speed that you can get. But depending on your individual line conditions (the line stats I mentioned earlier), and the distance from the central office where your line terminates, they can and do adjust the down and up speeds to give you the best service that is possible under those conditions by assigning you a DSL profile. An ISP will usually have several to choose from to fit most situations.

When I pointed out what line stats I’ve had and should have to him, he did a fair amount of investigation as what he was looking at didn’t make a whole lot of sense. What was also worrisome was the fact that he couldn’t find a profile to put me on. Thus, he put me on hold to speak to a manager. After he came back on the line, he made a couple of attempts to change my profile to account for the line stats he was seeing. When that failed, he concluded it was a Bell issue and he was going to put a ticket into Bell. I agreed to that after he read off some boilerplate that made me responsible for almost $88 if Bell didn’t find a problem and went to bed with no Internet. By this point it was midnight.

I got up this AM and found Internet access is live, but I’m getting 9.5 megabits downstream rather than the 12.5 that I used to be getting. But it is unstable as it disconnects and reconnects frequently. But it allowed me to type this blog entry. We’ll see what happens as it may take Bell up to 48 hours to resolve this.

Now, I am okay with what happened after I got on the line with someone from Teksavvy. In fact, I would describe the efforts of the customer service agent I spoke to as “heroic” and if he were one of the agents that I’m paid by my customers to evaluate, I’d give his efforts, customer handling skills, and temperament an “A”. What I am not okay with is the fact that it took a Twitter rant to get to that point. I was completely unable to dial them up and get to someone in a timely manner. What’s worse is that this appears to be a ongoing problem with them based on the fact that if you do a Google search for “Teksavvy long wait times” you get similar stories. What’s worse for them is that they’re dealing with ticked off customers on Twitter who have the same complaints as the ones that come up in Google searches. Plus my Twitter rant was favorited and retweeted other Twitter users. If someone is looking for a telco and searching either of those to see what they find for Teksavvy, the results will not be good and they’ll likely go with another company.

This is a major problem for Teksavvy and one that threatens their business. Why? Landing a customer is the easy part, but after sale service is what keeps them coming back. When they stop coming back because your after sale service isn’t that good, that affects future sales which affects their bottom line. I will give them some free advice. They need to not only acknowledge that they have issues with their customer service, but they also need to figure out why and remedy it quickly. Judging from my experience, the Google and Twitter searches, and the fact that I’ve posted this, the clock is clearly ticking for them.

As for my threat to look for another telco. It wasn’t a threat. It’s on my task list for today to see what’s out there in terms of service, price and customer service. But I will say that if Teksavvy makes clear improvements to their customer service, I can be convinced to stay with them.

Stay tuned for an update.

UPDATE: A voice mail was left on the home phone line just before 10AM today. A Bell tech is being dispatched on Sunday September 1st between 12PM and 6PM. I was planning to do a server upgrade for a customer, but I’m going to be rescheduling that since my wife will not be home. But seeing as I depend on my Internet connection to help me to make a living, I have little choice. More updates to come.

UPDATE #2: My wife suggested that I call Teksavvy to see if they could get Bell to move my appointment. They can, but it would be the third of September. I need a reliable Internet connection long before then, so I am leaving the appointment as it is. That’s not Teksavvy’s fault as they are at the mercy of Bell. But it doesn’t create the best optics for them. At least the customer understands and I am able to push this upgrade to Labor day. Still, this doesn’t create the best optics for me and what I do.

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Upgrading My Internet Was So Much “Fun”

Posted in Commentary with tags on August 8, 2013 by itnerd

Something that I encourage my customers to do is to always check what they’re paying for the telco services that they are getting as it is not uncommon for prices to drop and you end up paying more than you have to. Case in point, my DSL connection into my home. I was paying $32.95 a month to get 6 Mbps downstream service with a 300 GB usage cap with Teksavvy. A good deal in my opinion. But I noticed on their website that I could get 15 Mbps downstream service with a 300 GB for the same price. That’s clearly a better deal. Thus I gave Teksavvy a call last week to set up an upgrade. Now to make the change, there was a $50 fee and Bell (who does the work for Teksavvy as they are Bell resellers) would have to come out to my place twice to get the job done. I wasn’t thrilled about the fee, but Bell has to get paid somehow I suppose. So I signed up and I had an appointment for sometime this week. I was also told to watch my e-mail for details. Total time invested was about 30 minutes which included being put on hold three times.

Fast forward to this past Sunday. I get a call from Teksavvy and the woman that I spoke to confirmed that the upgrade would happen on August 8th (today) and Bell techs would have to visit twice to get the job done between 12 and 9 PM. So that means that I would only be working with customers for less than half the day. Not the biggest deal in the world unless you’re self-employed as that cuts into your potential income for the day. But it was understandable so I won’t complain. Much.

Now let’s go to last night. I had flown out to see a customer for an emergency earlier in the day and returned just after 5PM. I caught up on my e-mail and I decided to unwind by playing some Team Fortress 2 online with 23 of my closest friends. At around 7PM, I lost all Internet connectivity. I did some basic troubleshooting and found that my DSL modem was not syncing to the network. My first thought was that Bell had pulled my line card in preparation for my upgrade. So I posted this Tweet to Teksavvy:

Much to Teksavvy’s credit, I got this response back in very short order:

So I direct messaged (DM) them with my account info and a quick synopsis of what happened and after doing some checking, they suspected that Bell pulled my line card to install a faster one. Since Bell was coming out today, there was no point in submitting a ticket to Bell. Thus I was offline for the night. So that I could at least get my e-mail, I used my iPhone 5 in Personal Hotspot mode. This turned my iPhone 5 into a wireless router with access to the Internet via LTE. Thankfully I have a 6GB data plan with my provider so that I have the ability to use it in situations like these.

I got up this morning and found that the DSL modem now is syncing to the network, but I still had no Internet. I suspected that there has to be some additional work done by the Bell techs before I get my Internet back. Again, much to Teksavvy’s credit, they direct messaged me at 8:30 this morning asking me to keep them updated. I responded with a request for them to check my line stats so that I could confirm that my line card had been put back. They found an active connection and after some troubleshooting with no success suggested that there wasn’t much they could do until Bell completed the work order. That’s understandable, so I waited for Bell to arrive.

Just after 1PM, my Internet connection came online. I did a speed test using speedtest.net and got these results:

Not bad. I can tweak it by playing with the way the DSL modem connects to the phone jack. I have it on a phone cable that is longer than six feet which is the recommended length. So I should be able to get slightly faster speeds if I shorten that cable.  A tech came up to my unit just before 2:30 to check to make sure that I had Internet access and what my speed was using speedtest.net.

Seriously.

The result that I got was within acceptable limits as in Canada, Internet access tends to be advertised as “up to” a given speed. If that’s why I had to be at home and cancel my appointments for the day. That’s kind of lame.

Now, if I may make some suggestions. Here’s how things could be better:

  1. The window for a tech to show up shouldn’t be between 12PM and 9PM. That’s 9 hours. Make it a three hour window as people have lives. Now I get that Teksavvy in this case isn’t in complete control of that, but perhaps they should suggest that to Bell?
  2. If Bell is going to pull a line card, how about doing it when a customer is expecting to not have Internet access. For example, if the tech is scheduled to come out between 12PM and 3PM, pull it during that time. Not the night before.
  3. Don’t send a tech out to just to run a speed test. Either phone me to see if I have service when you’re done and talk me through doing a speed test or if I don’t have service, I will phone to complain.

The good? Teksavvy responded well over Twitter to help me. Kudos to them for being responsive.

Now I will go enjoy my new Internet speeds.

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So My Phone Went Out Again….

Posted in Commentary with tags , on March 12, 2013 by itnerd

….But unlike the last time that this happened, I had a much more positive outcome. But let me start at the beginning.

We got home last night and I noticed that one of my cordless phones said that a line was in use. That was weird so I picked it up. There was no dial tone.

Not good.

So I then did some troubleshooting. First I unplugged all the phones and plugged them in one at a time and listening for a dial tone. No joy there. I then did it again, but this time I removed the DSL modem. No joy there either. But I did notice that when I put the DSL modem back, I had Internet, though it was running at half the speed. So I knew that I had some sort of connection to the Bell central office about 1KM away. Since I had not made any changes in the condo, the only logical conclusion was that the issue was external. As in the wiring closet where all the condo’s phones go, or outside the property. So at 11:00 at night, I phoned Teksavvy technical support via my cell phone. The woman who answered the call was pleasant, and wanted me to go through the troubleshooting steps that I had just done. I simply explained that I had already done what she was asking me to do and she was on the phone with Bell to arrange a service call. Within 15 minutes, I had arranged to have a tech come out the next day between 12 and 5 PM. The catch was that if the problem was inside my condo, it would cost me almost $90. I wasn’t concerned about that as I knew there was zero chance of that.

The next day the tech arrived at 1:30 PM. He did some tests internally and confirmed what I already knew which was that the problem was elsewhere. Within 20 minutes he was back and I had phone service and my DSL service was back to full speed.

Though it was a Bell tech fixing the phone, Teksavvy made the call to send a tech and did so quickly. Unlike the last time when Bell provided my phone service, there were no attempts to upsell me to something I didn’t need, there were no missed appointments, there was no lying about missing the appointment. Just a quick turnaround to fix my phone. Bell should take notes as this is how it should be done. It’s reinforced my decision to use Teksavvy as my phone provider. It was a very positive experience overall which is why I’m posting this. I really believe that both positive and negative customer services need to be shared so that consumers know who will treat them right and who won’t. In this case, it’s the former.

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Bye Bye Bell! – Part 4

Posted in Commentary with tags , on April 26, 2010 by itnerd

So we’re one month into our adventure with Teksavvy Home Phone and two things have come up that I’d like to update you on. First one of my readers made this comment in part 3 of my adventure when I mentioned that I’m expecting a bill from Bell because they want 30 days notice:

“I bet you will get billed. It seems that unless you give 60 days notice, you seem to get billed. Lots of people on DSLReports have had it happen.”

Guess, what? We got billed. My wife paid it before I could stop her from doing so. If we get billed again, we’ll be phoning Bell as clearly this is a cash grab. The funny thing is, that when you look for info on how to cancel your service on bell.ca, they tell you to phone a Bell customer service rep. I guess they do that so they can try to convince you not to switch. It would be nice if Bell gave you those details up front, but they don’t strike me as the type of organization who would want to do that. After all, why would Bell want to actually do something that facilitates their customers ability to leave them?

The second thing that happened is that we got a card from Bell saying that “It was better with you here” and thanking me for our business. Oh yeah, they offered to waive the reconnection fee if we decided to come back. It was a nice card on a good paper stock and it made a bit of an impression on my wife. However, she did point out that if Bell really wanted to retain our business, here’s what they had to do:

  • Charge a fair price for their service: Seeing as we were paying $40 a month for phone service and Teksavvy was $12 a month cheaper for phone service, Bell is way out of line. Now Bell did offer us some deals when we asked about our contract status, but they would only last a year and then we’d be back to $40 a month. Sorry Bell. No deal.
  • Provide excellent customer service: Our rather horrific customer service experience is what started this ball rolling. Perhaps if Bell had handled this better, I wouldn’t be talking about this in my blog. Now I will admit that Bell claims to be improving that, but those improvements are way too late for me to stay with them.

Bell didn’t do either of those things which is why we’re with Teksavvy now. Speaking of Teksavvy, we’ve had no problems with our phone service at all and we haven’t had to call them for anything. That’s a good thing in my book.

We’ll keep you posted if anything else happens.

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Bye Bye Bell! – Part 3

Posted in Commentary with tags , on April 4, 2010 by itnerd

So March 30th has come and gone, and the universe didn’t end after switching from Bell to Teksavvy Home Phone. One of the things that did happen is that Teksavvy called us to make sure that everything well (in fact they called us twice after we didn’t respond to their first call). That’s a nice touch and it shows their commitment to quality customer service.

We’re expecting something from Bell shortly. We’ve heard rumors that they charge you an extra month as you allegedly have to give them 30 days notice. We’ll see if they do that to us, and if they do I’ll let you know. We’ll also see if Bell sends us any marketing material. We remember when we switched our DSL based Internet to Teksavvy, Bell sent us a letter from Kevin Crull (President – Residential Services for Bell) saying that they’d miss us and they’d welcome us back when we wanted to come back. Let’s think about that for a second. We get better customer service and pay less for the same services from someone other than Bell and we would consider going back to Bell? I don’t think so. It’s not going to happen.

Stay tuned. I plan on reporting on what Bell does and I’ll let you know about important things like call quality and the like (which so far isn’t any different than Bell. That isn’t a shock as we’re still using Bell copper to deliver my phone service).

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Bye Bye Bell! – Part 2 [UPDATED]

Posted in Commentary with tags , on March 15, 2010 by itnerd

As you likely read in my last entry, my wife and I have decided to dump Bell Canada as our home phone provider and switch to Teksavvy since we get our Internet from them and they have excellent customer service. A reader e-mailed me to ask why I put a such an emphasis on the latter. The reason is simple: Given that there’s any number of companies that can supply you with the same services (in this case, home phone), the only thing that sets a company apart from its competitors is the quality of their customer service. We’ve had great experiences with Teksavvy thus far, and we are hoping that continues with their home phone service.

My wife and I called them just after 11AM today and we were on hold for 5 minutes before we got to an agent. Not a big deal as I’ve been on hold as long as 15 or 20 minutes with Bell, but it doesn’t help with the first impression that the customer gets. When we got to an agent, the process to set up everything was smooth. He explained everything in detail and answered all of our questions. From start to finish the process took about 15 minutes and we’d be getting an e-mail sometime today to confirm all the details. Overall, the process was very civilized. We have a date of March 30th set to make the switch and the Teksavvy rep was 99% sure that it would go smoothly. One big plus to this, Teksavvy is going to port our existing phone number across to them and cancel our Bell service for us. That is very cool as our last call to Bell and their attempts to keep our business were just a pain in the you know where.

We’ll report back on the 30th and let you know if everything went smoothly or not. We’ll also post updates as to if anything “interesting” happens between now and then. My feeling is that I’m about to hear from Bell Canada with a desperate attempt to keep our business.

UPDATE: Something that I forgot to mention, Teksavvy Home Phone includes $0.029/a minute long distance in Canada and the US. In my mind, that’s a very competitive rate as we occasionally have the need to dial long distance.

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Bye Bye Bell! – Part 1

Posted in Commentary with tags , on March 13, 2010 by itnerd

It’s time to dump Bell as my home phone provider.

After our recent experience with their customer service (and no, I don’t care that Bell is trying to improve on that), my wife and I decided that it was time for Bell to go. Frequent readers will recall that we did a test drive of Rogers Home Phone and found it to be a very good product. But the fact that it relied on a battery that lasted 6 hours at most bothered us. Plus we have DSL Internet access which meant that we would have to either get a dry loop to keep DSL or switch to a non DSL Internet provider. Given that we like Teksavvy our DSL provider as they have excellent customer service, the odds of us switching Internet providers was zero. That’s when we remembered that Teksavvy also offers Home Phone service. We looked at the pricing and we could save just over $12 by switching to them. The only downside is that they use Bell copper to deliver service as they are a Bell wholesaler, so Bell still gets money from us. But they’d get much less money from us and we’d be dealing with a company that delivers excellent customer service. That was good enough for us to switch. All we had to do is first confirm that we’re not under a contract with Bell.

That turned out to be entertaining.

My wife called Bell and confirmed that we’re not under contract, which meant we could switch home phone providers at will. Then the person in whatever call center in India that Bell has contracted (as the person was clearly Indian) who clearly clued in that we were looking to dump Bell then offered my wife a deal of $34.94 a month for 6 months if we agreed to a 12 month contract (which would only save us $5 a month). She declined the offer and tried to end the call. That’s when he offered to transfer her to the “loyalty” department. I guess that department has better deals than he can offer. She refused that too. He also tried to sell her TV and Internet which she also refused. In fact with all his attempts to offer us deals to keep us as a customer, it took over 5 minutes for my wife to get off the phone.

Talk about aggressive. I wonder what Bell will do when we actually pull the plug on them? Not that it matters, because we’ll be another lost customer to them.

On Monday we call Teksavvy. I’ll post about what happens.

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