Wow, what a day!

I just spent over an hour on the phone with Rogers customer service in an epic battle for $75 dollars. It all began when I signed up for student-plan internet, and it all just ended, when I got my money back after a really long conversation with a few (surprisingly) understanding customer service managers.

To cut this story short, apparently after installation of the student-light service, I was supposed to receive an email that would guide me to a page where I would then upgrade my internet to a faster speed, all at no charge. Wonderful, isn’t it? Yea, the concept of a free upgrade wasn’t bad, the associated service was terrible! When I signed up, the rep just failed to mention this one thing – the email step. I also forwarded all my internet related emails to a junk mail, which didn’t help either! So in the end, I got overcharged by $35 two month in a row.

When I finally called the customer service, I was bumped between a few agents who couldn’t say anything other than “sorry, but it’s not my fault”. However, having prior experience dealing with Rogers I quickly explained to the next-lousy-agent that their actions could constitute a class action law suit (hey, she didn’t know any better!), which got me right to the manager. After waiting on the line for a while and then going throw a long processes of once again explaining all the misery, the manager decided to give me the money, with a clause that now that I got the money I will no longer complain. Throughout the process, they also kind of implied that it was always my fault for not checking my email often enough.

Money aside, this is an interesting problem!
At the end of the day, it’s not customer service’s fault that I didn’t get my internet,  neither is it my fault for not checking my email, but most likely it is a process design fault. I highly doubt that Rogers specifically design their processes to screw the customer over. Most likely, this online upgrade system is created because it is much cheaper for the company to maintain the service remotely rather than deploy a technician for every upgrade.

Most of the people who went through the similar ordeal probably failed to reach the end and are now just pissed-off overpaying customers. Although direct costs hitting Rogers are therefore low, and they can afford to refund money to annoying customers such as myself, this is really bad for them in the long term.
(1) all unsatisfied customers will tell all their friends about their bad experience and reduce their new customer pool
(2) they will be most likely jump ships for a better promotion, when one is available. (I vaguely recall that when customer experience on TELUS tv was low, bounce rate was over 50%) Happy customers on the other hand, might want to maintain their loyalty event at a slightly higher cost, in exchange for a flawless user experience.

So why doest this happen? Why are we force to deal with nonsense like this every day? Perhaps all telecoms in Canada suck equally and therefore competition is not driving their improvements. However, by the massive amount of advertising they are dumping on us every day, it sure seems otherwise. It seems that they want to eat each other’s lunch, really badly! Then why can’t they?

One answer is most likely poor process design. Whoever build this upgrade system didn’t do it in a simple, human oriented way. (I won’t even get into the details of my experience with the system once it actually let me perform the upgrade). The could’ve lacked the skills, or knowledge of proper human interaction design. However, if they were say following a waterfall design model, the structure around their development might’ve been so rigid, they had to other choice but to release this half-done product. It’s also possible that the Quality Assurance on this product was outsourced or done by people who can only follow procedures, in which case if there was no procedure identified for this error, it was never captured.

Whichever the case, clearly Rogers could use some engineers to help them run things better.

I have recently been told by my dad that clearly no one will make a boss, fresh out of school, but perhaps somebody just could, eh? They could hire MBA grads to “solve” these problems or pay ridiculous fees to consultants… and get nowhere because all those people would want is (a) stay employed, therefore creating more problems that need solutions and (b) boss people around, therefore not having the time to really ask questions, like why?!

I am not arrogant, I just really want to help damn it, but apparently I first have to spend years and years in a cubicle doing some useless work until I earn my right to be helpful. I find that to be really odd.