While I applaud the initiative of offering premium value services at a reduced price to longstanding customers I had to correct the service representative on a number of points:
1) I hate being a Bell customer. It has been this way since I moved offices and my DSL connection was negligently left hooked up to my old location with no dial tone. Only the hard line was forwarded to the new location. Bell kept telling me everything worked, but I had no email or web connectivity for 2 horrifying weeks until Bell finally sent an engineer on site who discovered the carelessness and corrected it in a jiffy.
2) Bell persistently denied any culpability because I placed the order through my Internet Services Provider (so any deficiency must result from my not having ordered it directly through Bell).
3) Bell did offer me 3 days rebate on the telephone line rental for the hard line to my office ($23), but beyond that I would have to take it up with Bell Nexxia, who would just tell me to speak to my ISP. My ISP refused to get involved based on their experience of dealing with Bell, that it was a monumental waste of effort and just revised my billing period forward by two weeks.
4) I still haven’t settled the relocation charges, having put a stop payment on my PAC and carefully avoided paying any expense or interest related. So I am at a loss to know how I have a perfect credit history. In fact I am incensed. My only form of rebellion went completely unnoticed by both artificial and human intelligence.
The phone service rep was no junior. I was speaking to a seasoned industry pro who knew all the shenanigans that go on and was very sympathetic. He also told me that Bell is trying to come around and be more customer focused. He understood that I had some unresolved issues to manage before he could persuade me of the true value of his offer. I mentioned to him that my industry field was customer-centric marketing and that Bell didn’t have a clue what customer focus meant and wouldn’t as long as the CRTC provides a coattail for them to hide behind. Customer-centric marketing is very poorly executed within most regulated markets. This is why I have not moved to Rogers.
I had to tell this nice gentleman that the $1,200 he could save me is a worthwhile insurance policy against having to go through similar nightmares with Bell again and that the first reliable opportunity I could go VoIP then I would.
I don’t know that my small voice of protest will be heard. But I do know that this call-out initiative demonstrates how little Bell knows about its best customers. And, if this initiative was inspired by ever-increasing customer attrition rates, then bring it on.
I would not mind, however, meeting and presenting to Bell a true model of customer-centric marketing and working with them to retain customers without resorting to bribes. That might go along way towards offsetting my personal aggravation and even change my view of Bell in the long term.
