Well I finally did it. After being a customer for at least 9 years (it’s probably been more than 10) I’ve canceled my ADSL service with Bell. I had been contemplating it for at least 3 years and finally decided to move to Teksavvy last week. Though the service at Teksavvy is cheaper (I save about $10 dollars a month), it was the customer service at Bell that was the real motivator. Dealing with Bell support was doubly frustrating for me due to my technical background.

I wasn’t just calling up and saying that my internet was broken. I usually had the issue diagnosed and isolated to something outside of my network. I wanted customer support that understands the issue when I say “I did a packet capture and I see pppoe authenication packets leaving and I’m not getting any response back”. Bell’s support would just blindly try to troubleshoot my windows laptop until the ADSL issue resolved itself 3 days later. I’ve dealt with Bell’s support on serveral levels ( ADSL customer, ADSL reseller, 100 Mbps data circuits) and its all the same.

Canceling the service was an interesting process. I called up and told the support person that I wanted to cancel my service. He then transfers me to the retentions department.

The retention guy asks “What can I do for you today?”

mfd says “I’d like to cancel my adsl service”.

“May I ask why you’re canceling?” says the retention guy.

“Well I’m going with a cheaper provider but the customer service is the main reason” says mfd in as much a professional tone as he can muster.

“Would you be interested if I offer you a discounted price….” says the retention guy before he gets cut off with a stern “No!” from mfd

mfd goes on to say “At the end of the day the customer service is the issue and not the price.”

“Alright sir your service will be disconnected in 30 days” says retentions guy in a defeated voice.

The part that I find interesting is that he never asked about my experience with Bell’s customer service. Michael James has posted article after article about his experience and he’s certainly not alone (see Ellen Roseman’s Post). You would think at this point they would want to poll disgruntle customers for their experience to help improve their customer service. Its seems as though this retentions person and Bell in general continues to accept that they have bad customer service and are not looking to improve it. This is fine by me because all I have left is Bell’s telephone line which I will probably never get rid of.

Hopefully Bell will end the ADSL part of our relationship on a high note and won’t pull my Teksavvy service when they go to pull my Sympatico service. I’m not holding my breathe…

Quick Poll: Who thinks Bell will pull my Teksavvy service when they cancel my Sympatico service?

-mfd-