Baby steps to ending Bell blues
Last April, I issued a challenge to Bell: If you’re changing and improving, tell your customers so. And back up the rhetoric with a meaningful guarantee.
"We were just in the early stages of developing something at the time," says Kevin Crull, president of residential services.
This week, Bell announced something concrete to show that standards were being raised.
Customers who have service problems with home phone, Internet or TV – which cannot be corrected from Bell’s offices – can get technicians dispatched to their homes on the same or next day at no extra charge.
Also, customers can pay $59.95 to get next-day installation of home phone, Internet or TV. The fee is the same, no matter how many services are installed.
So, what happens if Bell cannot meet its guaranteed service levels?
Customers move up to the front of the line if Bell’s technicians do not show up as promised, Crull said, and they get refunds of fees paid for express installation.
To me, this guarantee lacks teeth if Bell doesn’t perform as promised.
Dominion’s fresh or free guarantee gave real meaning to its "fresh obsessed" campaign. It started in 2002 and ran until this summer, when the grocery chain was taken over by Metro Inc.
From 1993 to 1997, TD Bank guaranteed it would pay $5 to customers who waited in line for more than five minutes.
Since 2002, most large retailers have signed on to a code requiring them to give products free of charge (up to $10) if the scanned price at checkout is higher than the advertised or displayed price.
I’d like to see Bell offer a guarantee that covers more than service calls and installation.
Here are a few typical complaints I received about Bell in the past month:
Ernest Ackun says he was overbilled by Bell Mobility for long-distance calls and browser charges.
Alison Demchyshyn complains about overbilling on her Bell Sympatico account.
Carlos Augusto was reviewing his parents’ bills and saw they were paying $15.20 a month to rent a Vista phone easy quick payday loans. The rental service was terminated in 1999. Bell offered a refund of fees for only two years.
Margaret Millar signed up for Sympatico service in 2006, but never received a single bill. She called Bell many times to straighten things out and got nowhere. Now her Internet is cut off and she still can’t get hold of anyone.
You can see a common pattern. Bell makes billing mistakes, but customers struggle to reach anyone with enough authority to correct those billing mistakes.
So, wouldn’t a billing guarantee make sense?
How about offering three months’ free service to customers who complain three months in a row about the same problem?
Crull said he’s working on other areas where he can offer promises – such as billing, waiting times at Bell’s call centres and first-time resolution of problems.
He’s already implementing a plan to call customers whose payments are overdue by 30 days and ask if they have a dispute about service or billing.
"I hate it when the first time a customer hears from us is a collection call," he says. “I don’t want to send a person into collections if we haven’t resolved their problem."
While this announcement is a good start, I’m waiting to see a wider array of service promises before I stop singing the Bell blues.
Ellen Roseman’s column appears Wednesday, Saturday and Sunday.