Category: the Rant Board
This is going to be rather long, and it's the second time I'm writing this. This rant is in regards to phone and internet service providers in my area.
Recently, I switched to bell Canada for both my internet and phone, after being with rogers for over a year and a half. The reasons for the switch follow:
1. Rogers home phone was a digital service, and therefore, whenever I would make a call, there would be a delay between the person I was speaking do, and me. Rogers couldn't do anything about this.
2. Features constantly stopped working, and my modem would often reset itself for absolutely no reason. I had to get it replaced a total of four times, and it never truly worked the way it was supposed to.
3. When calling certain phone numbers, I would get a terrible quality line that reminded me of the early digital cellphones, and once again I would have a huge delay on my end. Calls would unexpectedly drop, and often I couldn't get through to certain numbers without experiencing terrible quality, and had to call in about it.
4. Rogers, in their infinite wisdom, insisted upon blaming either my house wiring, my telephone set, or my way of using the phone for all thre of the problems listed above, each and every time I called about them. Most of the time I had to hound them for weeks if not months on end to fix one simple problem, and a majority of the problems on my end were things that a four-year-old with an instruction manual could have fixed within seconds.
One particular incident occured shortly before I finally canceled my service with rogers. I had my home phone modem replaced for either the third or fourth time, and as a result, the second phone line, which is actually mine, did not work for the better half of a day. I finally had to call rogers to fix it, which they did do within a reasonable amount of time. A day later, I was unable to dial any long distance numbers without using a dial around code such as 1015945, which of course, charged me. Rogers also claimed that they would credit this back, and not only did they not credit it, but they took almost a week to fix my long distance. I finally called bell to find out about service with them, and was told that I could get it for almost half the price of what I was paying for rogers services. Not only that, the internet was actually faster and had a higher bandwidth cap. nine days ago, we had our bell line installed.
Four days later, we got the rogers bill: $1257.98. $568 of long distance minutes, on my line. The bill also included a direct reference to the UNLIMITED north america plan on my bill. I called rogers and asked them why the f*** they thought they could get away with charging me close to $600 rather than $20 per month for unlimited. I was told that I had been abusing the plan because I had gone over my allotted minutes. Now, do I need to spell this out? Un-lim-itt-ed. That means, no limit. And that is exactly what I told the representative. I was still told that I was abusing the plan, and, with a sinking feeling in my stomach at what the human race had become, I hung up the phone, called back and got another representative. I told this one that if I did not get my credit, plus an aditional credit for having to waste time on the phone speaking to the idiots who call themselves representatives, not only would the bill not be paid, but my mother was going to file a complaint with the better business bureau, and furthermore, I was going to do my best to spread the story of what rogers had done to me onto every single newspaper, radio station and website I possibly could. Considering that I had a copy of the bill on which I was overcharged, and that bill had a reference to the unlimited north american long distance plan being on both telephone lines, rogers got the message pretty quickly, and credited me back. They also canceled my services, which they had claimed they wouldn't do until the bill was paid, so I wouldn't continue to be charged for them.
The story, however, does not end here.
The next day, after having called in about an internet speed issue I was having with bell, I found out that I was on a profile with half the internet speed of what I was actually paying for. They said they would upgrade it. I called the next day and was told that there was no record of my previous call, and it hadn't been updated. I gave them another 24 hours to do it, which is the timeframe they claimed they would need, and it still wasn't done. The next day I got a call saying that they had a problem and needed to talk to me. I was told that they would need to send a tech out to investigate my service, because they couldn't find dsl internet on my phone line. As it turns out, the clueless representative I had spoken to had apparently confused my line with the primary phone line, which belongs to my mother, and is the line that the dsl modem is hooked up to. The funny thing about this is that all they would need to do is check the primary line, which is listed on the same account as the secondary one, and see that this line had dsl service. Anyway, after clarifying this, my internet was upgraded in, not 24, not 12, not 6, but 2...Minutes. That's right, two minutes. After the last two people told me it would take 24 hours. I think this just goes to show how much they don't train some of the representatives in call centers.
Anyway, I could go on about all the other crap rogers has put me through, or start in on my cell provider, but I won't, unless someone wants me to.
On a good note, I haven't had any issues with bell home phone and none with bell internet since it got upgraded, and it's a lot better than rogers.
Ok, I think I'm done now.
Kudos to you, Andrew! I think you did the right thing. It doesn't sound like you did what many people would do: sit there on the phone and just cuss out as many people as possible until you get what you want. It sounds like you said the right things to get what you wanted and to make them do their job.
And I agree with you, representatives of many companies are not well-trained. And I believe that even some of these reps are over-payed. They need to learn how to do their fucking job!
Don't even get me started with service providers, not just with phone, cable, and internet, but also with wireless routers. I have had no end of trouble with service providers, so I can totally see where you're coming from, Andrew. I've heard some bad things about Rogers myself. Remind me never to do business with them. lol. As for technical support, I wish these service providers would start thinking a little bit less about cheap labour, and a little bit more about customer satisfaction. How hard would it be to pay a few more dollars per hour, and have better trained staff?
Hehehehe, I kinda want to hear the rant about the cell provider. I can't imagine it being able to top the Rogers one.
Becky
lol, ok, here goes then.
For the past three years I've had telus mobility, which is, again, a Canadian cell phone provider. I have been on their pay as you go plan because I don't use it all that often. However, here is a very long list of things that piss me off about them.
1. Their per minute rate is $0.25, and for long distance it's an extra $0.30 on top of that.
2. Their after 6 and weekends plan is either $1 per day or $30 per month.
3. If you do not add a topup card to your account within a certain amount of time, your entire remaining balance, which for me is about $170, will be deducted and you'll have to start all over again.
4. If you are out of your local area, you can't get calls without being charged your standard long distance rate.
5. There is no long distance plan, none whatsoever. Everything, even the MyFaves plan, only applies locally.
6. If you don't know if you're out of your local area, the only way to find out, other than looking at their maps and chargin yourself an additional $0.05 per webpage, is to call your own number and see if it's long distance or not. There is no alert, no nothing, to inform you. It doesn't even trigger the roming alert.
7. If you call in to complain about being overcharged, you are informed that it should have been your responsibility to somehow look up your current area and determine whether it is within your local coverage area, all before your handset stops ringing, or better yet, charge yourself another $0.25 to call your voicemail, to both determine where you are and figure out who just tried to call you.
8. On their MyFaves plan, there is also no way to add 800 numbers to it, meaning I couldn't add my calling card.
9. Their latest promotion, and keep in mind this is a plan that is said to be aimed at younger people, is that if you register your credit card, and set it to autotopup for either $25 or $50 per month, you receive $0.20 per minute rather than $0.25. When I asked if I could just top up with that amount instead, I was informed that I would have to use a credit card. I was never able to get a straight answer about why, though.
10. When I add their pay-per-day features, they often don't remove properly and continually charge me every day until I find out about it and call in. Sometimes, I can't get the money back, even though i haven't used the feature that day.
11. The handset itself has been locked so that I cannot put any customized ringtones on it, I have to choose from their very small selection and pay either $2.50 for a polyphonic ring tone, or $4.00 for what they call a true tone, which is nothing more than a little clip of the song. Considering how well I can use goldwave and other such programs, it wouldn't be hard to put a clip of a song which they probably wouldn't have either, on my phone, but they have eliminated that possibility. Someone once told me there is a way to unlock it, so I'm hoping that I can figure that out at some point.
12. When I first signed up for the service in 2005, I was given their free voicemail which could only hold three messages, for three days. Now, that's not too terrible for a free voicemail package. It gets better, though. When I signed up again in mid 2007 with my new number, I was told that I could not receive the free voicemail plan, and had to argue for almost an hour just to get them to give it to me, even though the old account was still active and clearly showed that I had had voicemail in the past. Their new voicemail, which is better, costs $5 per month and has a 10-message capacity.
13. The only provider around here that supports gsm phones, which could potentially mean a talks phone, is rogers wireless.
14. And now, for the people who call me. I clearly state on my voice mail that I can't see my caller ID, and if they ever expect to get a call back, they will need to leave a message, but most of them don't. I think I could name about three people who do this regularely, and the others do not.
roflmao. Service providers, bleh, lol
Don't you sometimes feel like working for those companies because you know more than they do?
yes, I do, lol!
And now, rogers is not picking up the home phone and internet modems, and is continuing to charge us for things that we are not even using anymore. lovely.