‘La vie est Bell’ (cough, cough)
p2pnet news view Freedom | P2P:- Thankfully, under new its ownership, Bell Canada is giving the boot to the tacky beaver duo it’s been using as figureheads, together with the late and unlamented Emily.
“Beavers are best known for their natural trait of building dams,” says the Wikipedia.
Undoubtedly, that inspired Bell to dam the bandwidth of ISP clients and people with Sympatico accounts in what’s turning out to be a major business and PR disaster.
“With the tag lines ‘La vie est Bell’ in Quebec and ‘Today just got better’ in the rest of the country, Canada’s largest phone company hopes to reposition itself against formidable competitors in the wireless, TV, Internet and land line communications market,” says the Globe and Mail.
It might be a better idea for Bell to try to reposition itself as a company which genuinely cares about the people who keep it in business instead of routinely treating them like shit.
“It’s a straightforward and customer-focused brand that directly supports the Bell team’s goal,” the story has George Cope, president and chief executive officer of the ‘new’ BCE and Bell Canada, saying in a complete mockery of reality.
The goal?
“To be recognized by customers as Canada’s leading communications company.”
Will it, then, also do an extreme make-over on the way its representatives deal with customers?
‘You can certainly speak with a supervisor …’
Not long after news of the Bell traffic shaping fiasco broke, ” Bell-Not-So-Sympatico has issued a script it expects reps to follow when they’re trying to talk angry customers out of cancelling their contracts,” said p2pnet, going on »»»
“Who can I speak with about this issue?” – asks an imaginary customer.
The rep responds:
“Mrs. / Mr. customer, You can certainly speak with a supervisor if you need to, however I assure you that we stand behind our network management policy. Bell has the right to manage its network to deliver a consistent and reliable experience to all its customers and doing so is not a material change to the service.”
In other words, get stuffed.
Much more recently, “I worked at a third party call center taking bell tech and billing calls for QC and ON customers,” said ‘Samson’ in a p2pnet Reader’s Write, going on »»»
The whole thing is run like a joke. There is no acocuntability. A rep could upgrade you to the highest tier without even talking to you in order to get his commsion, and you would NOT be able to get out of the charges.
If the rep put in notes how its meant to look, your paying up.
And dont get me started on how they asked us to handle questions about p2p throttling.
As a Canadian I am awfuly ashamed of Bell.
“How did they ask you to handle questions about p2p throttling?” – I asked.
They, “essentially said to deny deny deny,” he said »»»
We could not say “throttle” or “traffic shaping”
If they ask if it’s in the terms in conditions that Bell could shape their traffic we had to say that the ToC … explained Bell is responsible for maintaining the network integrity. Of course under that logic they can do anything if it’s in the name of improving the network.
All we could say was “In an effort to provide consistent service to our customers we ensure that network resources are shared fairly.”
We could not mention or confirm anything related to how we identify traffic in order to shape it.
This was about 2 months ago. I’m not still working there so I don’t have the exact wording, just going off memory. But every rep had to sign that they read and understood the document that explained how to handle calls about this.
Just made me sick half the bullshit they tried to feed us, let alone their customers.
Example, If you call in and have a strong accent, reps commonly upsell them knowing full well that they didnt get the customer to understand everything involved. They get a yes and put it on. Makes me sick.
In a private follow-up email, “Bell gets away with far too much,”aid ‘Samson, continuing
I could complain all day about how bad Bell Sympatico is run form top to bottom. But a lot of it would be the fault of the call center and Bell’s lack of communication. And by Bell allowing it to continue.
Specifically, I would mention the practice of sending the first 2 non-billing-related calls to an Indian center in New Dehli before you would be directed to an agent in Canada.
This is obviously to discourage people from complaining, escalating, or getting answers, since the Indian reps do not really have the ability or the skills to fix any issues. On the third call they are considered “multi-callers” and put in a cue for my call center.
Secondly was the issue with call-backs. Since 90% of the time we could/would not do anything for the customer, it was procedure to schedule a callback so the issue could get resolved.
These call-backs almost never happen.
It’s a typical situation of if we can’t meet our promise, we shouldn’t promise it. But there so little communication between the call centers and Bell corporate that they can’t change the procedure to offer call-backs, despite knowing they can’t for what ever reason fill them.
Another small example of this type of no communication between the 2 groups is that our final test in training had to be from Bell corporate. The test consisted of out-of-date price plans, out-of-date packages, and out-of-date procedures.
This type of “I don’t care that it doesn’t work just keep on doing it anyways” philosophy shows its self in every aspect of the business.
From reps to the managers, no one was empowered to fix anything, so we just had to take it day by day, and try not to stand out by blowing any whistles.
Everyone knew the whole thing was a joke but no one wanted to hear it since there was nothing they could do about it.
The call center I worked at is called Sitel. Formerly Clientlogic. 320 Edinburg St, Moncton, NB
A recruiting website for Sitel can be found here.
http://www.localmoncton.com/Index.asp?storeid=151&DisplayMode=&DisplayWidth=
As you can see they don’t advertise Bell as a client (their biggest client), just the cooler XM radio. Which is a very small dept.
Stay tuned.
Jon Newton – p2pnet
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New York Times – xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx, August xx, 2008
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August 7th, 2008 at 1:09 pm
Reminds me of the late Digital Equipment Coroporation. One of the last CEO’s first actions was to re-brand Digital to give it a better, more modern image.
He made a slight change to the colour of the Digital Logo, and more importantly, he changed the dot over the I from a square dot to a round dot, to indicate the company was to be more flexible.
Little good that did.
Rebranding is tantamount to: “we don’t know how to fix the company, so we’ll play marketing games to try to hide our problems from the customers.
August 7th, 2008 at 11:35 pm
http://www.dslreports.com/speak/slideshow/20914825?c=1336018&t=seti&ret=L2ZvcnVtL3IyMDkxMzg5NC1CZWxsLWJlbGlldmVzLXRoYXQtcmVicmFuZGluZy13aWxsLXNhdmUtdGhlLWRheQ%3D%3D
haha
hahaha
Give me a break, Bell…
August 9th, 2008 at 7:20 pm
Bell “tech support” is a joke, I’m a network admin, tried to trouble shoot my uncle’s faulty dsl connection from Bell, after getting past the 1st and 2nd level Indian call center, the “Senior Tech” in Canada concluded my network card was faulty, well just to humour him, I told him to hold and I grabbed a spare NIC and replaced it in the PC, rebooted , voila ! Same crap, the DSL line was still down. So after shooting down the “Senior” tech rep, they finally gave in and promised to send a tech over to troubleshoot the line within 3 days. This was over 10 days ago now, no one has shown up yet, but don’t worry , my uncle is still getting billed for all the service he is not getting.
August 9th, 2008 at 9:48 pm
I was a Senior Tech. And the Senior Tech Troubleshooting flowchart, actually does end with “PC Issue”. Some of these senior techs never owned or operated a computer before. Most never held a previous position in the company or any related field. And have no additional training besides basic customer service and phone skills. “Follow the flow chart, its all in there” they say.
I consider my self pretty computer literate but troubleshooting why someones internet does not work is not always very easy. And the flowcharts were crap, any agent there that knew somewhat what they were doing didn’t refer to them at all.
If the DSL light is on. And the PPPoE software says its connected. We are at a dead end and call it a PC/unsupported issue. Despite obvious patterns and scenarios like the previous poster mentioned where every part of PC and physical setup was replaced.
I frequently heard situations where someones internet working was dependent on their phone being off the hook. Months of these calls and still every time it came up we had no answer except to dump on bell home phone, sending them in a vicious circle.
And the techs that actually go on site call us to troubleshoot the issue, the same line regular customers do. They really are only good for plugging stuff in unless by chance you happen to get one who learned networking on his own.
Sigh….
August 13th, 2008 at 4:13 pm
Few good techs remain at Bell, unappreciated mostly, as managers want to take the credit for themselves, and actually steal the idea as their own, eventhough they don’t fully understand the full concept, and their superior aren’t the wiser, so you can see the house of cards Bell is.
How can you make informed decisions if you lack the knowledge in the subject matter, this goes for many of the Tech support people at Bell, most will flunk basic electricity test, yet they are in charge of making expensive decisions, with costly negative consequenses.
As for the new image, I was not a fan of the Beavers, but I say bring them back, er er er er so tacky and stupid, yes George it stimulates discussions alright, discussion such as “what a stupid idea” is this the brain child of the shrink who designed the Vancouver Canucks uniform, back in the 70s, supposedly to set fear in the opponent team, it was the joke of the NHL instead, save the cash and pull the plug, you want good image, provide good service and clean up Operation, that is your bottle neck, CUSTOMER SERVICE will not be a problem if you did not have angry customers, happy customers don’t call in and complain, get it? it’s Operations that breeds angry customers, not Customer Service, let’s go back and revisit your OP team, you kept at least 1 dead wood at the top wasting valuable oxygen, 1 who can hardly speak english, managing thousands who ONLY speak english, for a telecom company, Bell needs to communicat better within.