Dear Joe Natale, CEO of Rogers Communications - please allow customers to cancel and downgrade their services online.
Seriously. This is 2019.
It is 6:41pm on a Tuesday evening. I am an entrepreneur and I have work to get done right now. If I did not need to work, I would be outside enjoying what has been one of the finest days of the greatly-awaited Spring in Toronto.
However right now, and for the past hour, I have been in “Live Chat” on the Rogers website, communicating with a customer service agent and trying to cancel a TV package, costing roughly $80 per month, from my account.
After expressing my desire to cancel the TV plan and continue with internet service only, I was taken down a wormhole of offers and the consequent cost-benefit analysis, which we all privately conduct in similar circumstances. At the end of this time-consuming and unnecessary duel, I was resolved in my desire to remove the TV package from my plan. It was then, for the first time, that I was instructed to call 1–866–737–4159 if I wanted to downgrade to different services.
The last time I called Rogers to make an account change, I was on hold for a total of nearly three hours. The prospect of this situation repeating was deeply undesirable, however more concerning was the fact that Rogers gives its customers no other option.
Quite literally the only way to remove Rogers customer services is to call this number, wait on hold, and convince someone on the other side to perform the task of removing an item from your virtual shopping cart that reappears as a new invoice every month.
There was no choice. I bit the bullet and dialed the number.
To my tiring amusement (but not surprise), a woman’s voice informed me that the number was unreachable from my device. When I delivered this message to the customer service agent from my chat, she breached protocol to called the number from an internal line, and perform the cancellation for me. This was, and still is a miracle to me and I am grateful to Nahyssa for being able to complete the task I set out over an hour earlier to complete.
However, this is still no excuse. Spending an hour of agent time and making customers complete a gauntlet of site searches, customer service chats, and phone calls is bad business. I am now in the search for mobile carriers. Do you think Rogers Mobile is an attractive proposition given this experience?
This is 2019, Joe. You are driving one of Canada’s leading technology companies. You can do so much better!
Yours Truly,
T.M.
& Ideas Are Free
