Dear Mr. Sabia*:
My business has been a Bell Customer since inception, and we currently use your high-speed internet service as well as multiple business phone services. I have been a loyal supporter in the past, but it seems that nothing is easy with your company, and the user experience continues to deteriorate.
The main reason I am writing to you now is because it is the only way I can be sure someone will actually pay attention to this complaint.
Please indulge me as I tell you about the latest installment, as I try to set up a simple vacation auto-respond message.
Yesterday, I spent time trying to get a vacation message set up on webmail, but it would not work. I did check online help and FAQs, with no obvious reason for the problem.
Today, I spent an hour on the telephone with one of your service representatives (from 10:00 am to 10:12 am on musical hold, and thereafter until 10:54 with Vladimir).
The problem is this: I have e-mail addresses that are at
domains not hosted by Bell, such as my company domain, abbottresearch.com. Any
mail that is originally sent to another domain will not receive an auto-respond
message, regardless of the fact that it is visible in my in-basket on webmail. This information is not in your FAQ.
Mr. Sabia, I know your time is valuable, but so is mine. Please ask your engineers to 1) make your webmail functionality less parochial and 2) immediately amend your FAQ on this issue to make it clear to customers that your service does not work with any address that isn’t a Bell domain. How hard can this be?
Your technician’s recommendation is that I seek a solution from my web host. And you can be sure I will be seeking a solution. Because this is not an isolated incident. Here are a few of the other problems I have had in the past year with your company:
· Difficulty setting your account numbers up on electronic payment functions so I can pay my bills online. You should really give people a prize if they can figure out which number on your bill is the actual electronic billing number.
· Finding out that I cannot get cell-phone coverage in Jamaica, where one of my clients is. Your competitors don’t seem to have this problem
· Finding almost anything on your web site. I thought about trying to consolidate my bills, but this is something that requires more than an MBA to master, and was too complex for me
· Taking the time to set up online bill information access, and finding out that a) it is really designed for people with advanced engineering skills and b) you can’t get the information any faster anyway, so it’s not that useful for a small company
· Constant phone calls from people who purport to be enquiring about service but actually want to sell me something. The most recent one wanted me to lock in for several years in order to get a discount. There is no discount that would make me want three more years of this
Yours truly,
Susan Abbott
PS I invite you to put the word “complaint” into your own online search engines and see what happens.
*CEO of Bell Canada
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