OTTAWA – The Commission for Complaints for Telecom-television Services (CCTS) said today it received nearly 19,300 complaints from Canadian telecom and TV customers, an all-time high in the organization’s 12-year history.
Given we’re also at an all-time high for wireless and broadband customers in Canada, not to mention how recent news and noise surrounding telecom companies in Canada have likely helped more Canadians realize the CCTS can help, such an increase is not surprising.
Canadians, said the CCTS annual report (which tallies complaints for the 12-months ended July 31), complained most often about their wireless service, followed in order by internet, TV and local phone services. Billing issues were the number one problem, followed issues with disclosure of important information about their services.
Bell Canada’s share of all complaints declined in 2018-19 from 33% to 30% (almost 5,900) while Rogers’ share also declined from 10% to 9% (just over 1,800). Telus’ share increased, however by 1.5% to 8% as the number of Telus complaints jumped by 71% to just over 1,600, the CCTS release pointed out.
The CCTS also reports a 42% increase in the number of service provider violations of the Wireless Code where most common Code violations involved the failure to provide important documentation, and proper notice before disconnection of service. There were only three breaches of the Television Service Provider Code, says the release.
“Record numbers of complaints, rapid industry change, and our own desire for continuous improvement have motivated us to focus on our dispute resolution process, and we’re looking at ways to improve our service to make it more efficient, effective and transparent,” said Howard Maker, CCTS’ commissioner and CEO. “Our goal is to ensure that we continue to provide a service that’s easy for consumers and service providers to use, that resolves disputes promptly and fairly, and provides valuable insight into the specific challenges faced by consumers.”
The CCTS continues to successfully resolve over 90% of complaints, despite the increase.
Customers who are unable to resolve an issue directly with their telecom or TV service provider can file their complaint online for free at www.ccts-cprst.ca.
The carriers do care about customer service and are quite concerned about how they look when this report comes out, despite how the number of complaints, when spread across the total number of subscribers, is pretty small. For example, Bell’s figures show it had 36 complaints per 100,000 subscribers, Telus had 19 complaints/100,000 and Rogers 18 complaints/100,000.
That doesn’t mean everyone else is super-happy with their provider, just that the carriers are good enough so that number of tough cases which end up in front of the CCTS are statistically speaking, pretty small.
“While CCTS complaints were up for all national carriers, Bell’s share of the total continued to decline for the fourth year in a row, with the smallest increase in the number of complaints among our major competitors,” said Bell in a statement to Cartt.ca.
“We’re on a multi-year journey to improve our customer experience and customer feedback is so important to us. While one complaint is one too many, we have started to see progress on our plan – we have the fewest complaints per subscriber of any national carrier and we are the only with a drop in complaints over the last seven years,” said Eric Agius, senior vice president, customer care at Rogers in an e-mailed statement.
“Telus continues to lead the industry, as we have since 2011, with the fewest complaints amongst national carriers. We recognize that complaints across the industry have increased and we are listening. At Telus, we review every complaint with a focus on resolving it quickly and creating operational improvements to benefit all of our customers,” said Tony Geheran, executive vice-president and chief customer officer at Telus, in their statement.
“This reporting year, we saw an increase in complaints following a price increase to a bring-your-own-device wireless plan; we heard from a lot of customers who were frustrated with our pricing and they said the contract was difficult to understand. We embraced this feedback. Since then, we have simplified our contract language to make it more transparent, introduced new endless data plans that eliminate fears about overages, and have dramatically cut-down the time it takes to connect with our customer service teams. We are encouraged to see that this fall, we have received fewer complaints in comparison to the same time period last year.”
Having anticipated a rough ride with the CCTS, thanks to its well-documented customer management system implementation snafus (“With 1,801 billing issues raised, Cogeco has seen a huge increase of 582% from last year,” says the CCTS report), Cogeco Connexion also released a short statement.
“During the period covered by the CCTS report, Cogeco Connexion did encounter issues which were related to the implementation of our advanced CMS system. These issues, which are now resolved, generated spikes in the number of direct calls received and consequently delays in resolving some customer problems which further extended our resolution time. Despite our efforts and the addition of new resources, the situation resulted in an abnormal increase in the number of complaints during that period.
“However, over the last six months, Cogeco Connexion has returned to its normal high standards of customer service and is now responding to all of the complaints filed. We recognize that this situation has been disruptive for our impacted customers that are accustomed to Cogeco’s high quality service and we apologize again for that and reiterate our continued commitment to excellence in customer service,” reads its statement.
