In the final version released this week, the telecom regulator orders the firms to stop doing things it feels are unfair to customers.
Starting in December, there will be no more three-year wireless contracts. You will be able to cancel a contract at no cost after two years.
Firms won’t be allowed to change key terms and conditions of a contract — such as prices — while making you pay a penalty to leave early.
They will have to unlock your phone no more than 90 days after a purchase — or immediately if you have paid in full.
They will have to cap your charges at $50 a month if you exceed the limits on your domestic data plan — and at $100 a month for data roaming while outside Canada.
The CRTC is paying more attention to the voices of individual consumers since Jean-Pierre Blais took over as chairman last June. Industry voices aren’t always heard.
Before Blais arrived, the CRTC didn’t even want to look at a wireless code. It preferred to let a competitive market take care of abuses.
But a hands-off approach wasn’t working in Canada, where new entrants were struggling to gain traction against the Big Three telecom suppliers (Rogers, Bell and Telus). A competitive market was years away.
Blais is to be commended for his decision to go ahead with a wireless code — and to strengthen it when consumers said it didn’t go far enough.
Banning three-year contracts was a popular suggestion made by participants at CRTC’s online discussion forum. But there was nothing about cutting contract length in the draft code.
Eliminating bill shock was another area people could agree on. They wanted to know their monthly statements would be stable and they wouldn’t have to pay for unexpected charges.
Rogers is the only telecommunications firm that has an ombudsman to review customer problems. Kim Walker took up the post in January 2012 and is just releasing her first annual report. (I got an advance copy.)
Over half of customer complaints were related to wireless services, the company’s largest business segment. That swelled to more than 70 per cent when Rogers’ discount brand Fido was included.
The biggest complaint area was billing and service changes. Equipment repair and upgrades came next, followed by promotions and cancellations.
Walker used case studies to show the types of complaints she handled and how she made a difference. One was about data roaming charges.
A customer called Fido to buy a travel package to keep roaming costs low on an upcoming trip to Miami. But he faced a $469 bill when he returned.
What happened? He had gone on a cruise while in Miami, so his usage was billed to a satellite company that wasn’t included in his travel plan.
A Fido manager waived half the roaming bill. The president’s office supported the solution. But the customer wasn’t happy and appealed to the ombudsman’s office.
The ombudsman asked what he would have chosen to do if he had known that no travel plans were available while on his cruise. He would have avoided using his phone altogether, he replied.
The Fido team wasn’t aware he would be taking a cruise. That information came out only when the ombudsman got involved.
The result: He agreed to pay the fees that applied to a land-only vacation, reducing his roaming bill to $200. And Rogers vowed to try harder to tell customers that travel packages didn’t apply on cruise ships.
More than 70 per cent of people who went through the ombudsman’s office were satisfied with the customer service, according to a Rogers survey.
However, 61 per cent of customers didn’t know of the ombudsman’s office and 56 per cent didn’t know of the four-step escalation process for handling customer complaints.
You can find out more if you go to the company’s website and search for ombudsman.
Original Article
Source: thestar.com
Author: Ellen Roseman
No comments:
Post a Comment