Friday, November 02, 2007

Rogers finds clever customer-hostile technique

Rogers has reasonable coverage in the Vancouver area, but I get a dropped call 90% of the time on the same spot in Burnaby - the 29nd avenue dip between renfrew and slocan. I always called the 611 service to complain and always giev me the assurance that they would not charge me for the call. Got a lot of free calls that way.

Rogers new approach to getting people to stop calling to complain is amazingly brazen, and clever in a most diabolical way. They tell you they can't provide service for you if you are calling from YOUR CELL PHONE! No, even though they did it for 10 years, now they want you to pull over to the use the Telus pay phone, of which there are, let me see...carry the zero, Zero left. Oh, but I can always just wait to get to the office at which time, do I really want to queue up on the wait list while I should be working? - no.

You have to admit, it is an absolutely brilliant strategy if you want to stop customers trying to get assistance, which is of course the underlying desire of poorly-managed businesses who never learn that they could reduce service costs and increase customer loyalty by actually delivering good products at a reasonable price - something the cell phone carriers have never learned.

Good thing work pays for that account - I would have cancelled it there and then. But then I have to wait till I can get to a land line...