Gotta love what you get in the Mail

What do Rogers , Bell Mobility and Loblaws have in common? All of them are leading Canadian consumer brands, yet more importantly, all of them continue to fall short of meeting my expectations as a customer. I don't know about you, but it's becoming more apparent to me like a fair percentage of the time that I spend interacting with the aforementioned brands results in what I would call 'bad customer experiences'.

Lets start with Bell Mobility . Earlier this month, they sent me a letter about a change to my prepaid mobile service. Normally, this would be fine, yet this time around, it was anything but OK, and here is why:

• The letter had the wrong address on it (I moved recently) and even though my monthly statements had been coming to the new address, for some reason this particular letter was still going to my old address creating cause for concern on my part, right from the start.
• The letter mentions "an upcoming change to the price of my prepaid service", but wait a minute... I don't have a prepaid service - I am on a monthly plan, aren't I?
• The letter then mentions that the "price of the Prepaid 911 service will increase from $0.75 to $1.00 per month" leaving me even more confused.
• Finally, after getting to the end of the letter, I make my way back to the top of it just to read it through again and notice that I am being addresses as "a valued Bell Mobility customer" which is now making me wonder about the relationship that I have with them because if I am "a valued Bell Mobility customer", then why don't they know where I live or what type of business I have with them?

As a result, I decided to give their Customer Service department a call and discuss the letter with them. After waiting on the line for almost 10 minutes, I finally got through to someone. I explained that the letter was sent to the wrong address, that the information was not accurate and that I was concerned about it. The person on the phone stated that the address that they have on file was in fact my correct address and that I got the letter "by mistake". Mistake? OK, everyone makes mistakes, but how can you make so many mistakes in just one piece of communication? The Customer Service agent didn't have much to say on the matter and offered me the opportunity to file a complaint, which I took her up on, yet somehow I don't think that I have seen the last of these mistakes.

After about 30 minutes of dealing with that, it was time to move on to my next piece of mail. This one came courtesy of Rogers . I opened the envelope and saw my monthly statement for the Cable TV and Internet services that I subscribe to. After looking at the details, the billing amounts did not seem to make sense to me, so I gave their Customer Service Centre a call. After almost 8 minutes of waiting on the phone and dialing through several options (because these companies sell everything now, soon they will sell bread and milk), I finally got thru to a young fellow at their call centre in New Brunswick. I explained my concerns with the billing amounts for the time period stated on my statement and he said that he would need to open my account in their system and have a closer look. He started off by telling me that because I recently joined the service, that the first bill would be for a longer period than the normal 30 day span. I then asked him to explain what I would normally be billed going forward to see if it corresponded to what I was originally told when I signed up with their services. After several minutes on hold, The Customer Representative advised that he could not provide that information because the system was frozen. As a result, he elected to transfer me to another representative. I agreed to stay on the line, yet what was particularly concerning was that when the other representative got on the phone, he did not know what I was waiting for or who I was? So, I had to re-explain why I was on the phone and what information I was looking for. After a few minutes of voicing my concern (for the second time now), he attempted to look in to the system to get me the answer I was looking for. After trying for a few minutes, he confirmed that the representative that I was on the phone with earlier, had locked the system and as a result, he could not access my account and would need to call me back later with the information that I was looking for. This was getting frustrating, yet what choice did I have? I asked him to get in touch with the representative that I spoke with earlier to see if he could have him unlock his system, yet he didn't know who that person was. As a result, I had no choice but to hang up and wait for their call. Well, it's been almost two weeks since I had that conversation and guess what - nobody has called back. Guess they have better things to do than to deal with customer concerns. Here are some key "take-aways" that the people at Rogers might want to consider:

1. When you bill a customer for the first time and the amount is more than what it will be going forward, you might want to clearly indicate that on the statement somewhere in plain and simple English.
2. If there is more than one Customer Representative working on a customer call, then they should know each other in case they need to get in touch with each other after transferring the call from one to another should they need to deal with a customers concerns and provide the best possible service.
3. If a customer representative says that he is going to call back the customer to address a concern, then they or someone from the organization should call back.

As you can see, my day was going great so far, so why not pursue another piece of mail? I glanced at the weekly circular from Loblaws and was happy to find Freeze Pops on sale. My wife loves those things and hey, it's summer time and nothing beats a good Freeze Pop on a hot day. I pointed the ad out to my wife when she got home from work. As we do most of our shopping at Loblaws, we figured that we would just pick them up the following day as we were heading out there anyway. The flyer was dated July 8th to 14th promoting the special on Freeze Pops and we made it to the store on July 9th. After making it over to the Freezer section of the store, we looked around for several minutes, yet the Freeze Pops were not there. I then went back to the front of the store to get another copy of the flyer because I wanted to confirm that I had not mistaken their flyer for a competitors. I was correct, the Freeze Pops were in there. We looked around the section over and over again, and to our disappointment, there was no display of Freeze Pops. We asked one of the floor managers about it and he came over to the section with us, and he could not explain why there was no Freeze Pops, yet he confirmed that they did not have them in stock and never have had those particular Freeze Pops on on the floor. "OK then", I said. It makes you wonder why companies advertise products and then don't have them to offer to customers, but this was clearly a case of misrepresentation. I was not impressed and once again, my experience at the store was not a great one. How about the guy working for Loblaws - do you think her was impressed? Will never know for sure, but it certainly provides food for thought.

Gotta love what you get in the Mail.