OTTAWA – After being deluged with over 1,600 complaints from Public Mobile customers last week after the company decided to increase a popular promotional pricing plan by $10 a month (which it subsequently backed down on), the Commission for Complaints for Telecom-Television Services (CCTS) is reminding consumers that they must first contact their telecom or TV service provider to try and resolve any grievances.
In a letter published Tuesday entitled Lessons from the Public Mobile price increase, CCTS took issue with an iphoneincanada.ca article that repeated advice from a social media user about how to file a complaint online with the CCTS.
The advice provided in the article “actually had the potential to hurt consumers” CCTS said, despite its seemingly helpful intent, by encouraging consumers to answer that they had, in fact, tried to resolve this matter with Telus-owned Public Mobile first when they had not.
“Our Procedural Code requires that a consumer must have given the provider a “reasonable opportunity” to resolve the complaint before the CCTS can accept it”, reads the letter. "A little harmless gaming of the system, right? Well, not really. Here’s why.
The CCTS staff might have accepted all of these complaints – at least at first. Next, we would have sent them to an escalated complaint-handling unit at the service provider. The service provider would have then objected to the CCTS accepting most of these complaints, because it had not had an opportunity to resolve them first with the customer. We would have then been required to notify all of these customers that we could not accept their complaint until they first gave the provider an opportunity to resolve it. So consumers would have experienced needless delays, and all of this would have consumed hundreds of hours of CCTS staff time, diverting our resources from helping consumers who had tried to resolve their problems directly with their provider before filing complaints with us.”
