Cogeco’s communication issues
Joyce Huffman, an 89-year-old widow in Hamilton, Ont., found her home phone was cut off without notice by Cogeco Communications.
“My daughter and others who check on me daily were frantic after finding the line suddenly disconnected,” she said.
It was an identity mix-up. Another Joyce Huffman, living 200 kilometres away in Trenton, Ont., had died, and her sister had called to inform Cogeco of the death.
Gabriel Beausejour, a spokesperson for the Montreal-based telecom company, blamed the disconnection on an error by a customer service agent.
“We’re really sorry for what happened and we will use it as a learning opportunity with our agents. Sometimes mistakes happen,” he said.
When you lose an essential service — let alone three at once — you can usually reach your telecom provider and get a house call, if needed, in a hurry.
But Cogeco’s ability to respond to complaints has dropped sharply since late April, when it started installing a new computer system.
I was surprised to get busy signals when I tried calling the company on June 1. When I did get through, I listened to messages about an abnormally high volume of calls and substantial wait times for technical support.
“The complex operation of replacing our customer management systems is the root cause of this temporary and involuntary situation in our call centres,” Beausejour said.
“While this upgrade represents a major transformation, which carries its share of challenges and upheavals, we take all these special situations very seriously.
“Rest assured that our teams are working tirelessly and sparing no effort in resolving them as quickly as possible.”
Huffman spent nine days trying to reach Cogeco to reconnect everything. Her home phone was back in service when she contacted me on May 22, but she had to accept a new phone number and lose the one she’d used for 32 years.
Her TV and internet services, also cut off in error, were only partially restored after a technician brought the wrong parts to her home.
With media interest — the Hamilton Spectator also wrote about Huffman’s predicament — the Cogeco team worked quickly to restore all services by May 24.
“Joyce got a credit for loss of service and out-of-pocket expenses she incurred,” said her friend Ronald Oak, who emailed me when her internet was down.
“Cogeco also offered to try to get her original phone number back. But by that time, she had called so many of her necessary contacts with the new number that she decided not to change the number a second time.”
In southwestern Ontario (outside the city of Toronto), where Cogeco operates, many older customers go south for the winter and restore their TV service when they arrive home in spring. This timing aggravated the service problems.
“I am a very frustrated consumer,” Kathleen Hagan said. “We took a seasonal disconnect from March to May, something we have done for the past three years.
“Upon our return on May 4, Cogeco could not reconnect us due to a major glitch in the system. We had no phone, Wi-Fi or TV for two weeks. The Wi-Fi is on now, but we have no Canadian TV channels.
“The wait times to talk to anyone range from 40 minutes to over an hour.”
Hagan’s TV channels were restored once I forwarded her email to Beausejour. She also received one month’s credit for the services she didn’t receive.
Many frustrated Cogeco customers turn to Twitter to complain, often showing screen shots of their wait times.
There, I found a few tweets by former Toronto Star columnist Linwood Barclay, now an author of internationally bestselling mystery novels.
“O @cogeco O @cogeco/ You’re such an endless tale of woe/ Our cable’s dead, the Net’s not well/ It might be time to switch to Bell,” he told almost 13,000 followers on May 25.
On May 27, he was still unhappy. “So, two hours on hold, three days without cable or net, several tweets, even a couple of DMs (direct messages) that suggested they might care, today @cogeco asks, ‘what was your problem again?’ ”
Barclay talks about being a loyal Cogeco customer for at least three decades.
“Yet, when my cable and net both go down, I am told that it will be days before someone will do the service call, even after I explain that I work from home and am dead in the water with- out cable and internet,” he told the company.
“No one I have spoken to online or on the phone has cared in the slightest and when I broached moving to Bell, I was immediately offered a transfer to customer service so that I could cancel, as if one less customer was not the slightest concern to Cogeco.”
It turned out that a wire on the pole outside his house had snapped or was cut. This was a five-minute repair that didn’t even require anyone to be at home.
He thinks Cogeco should hire more people to handle a high volume of calls or else reduce its rates. When essential home services are cut off, “it’s imperative that there be an immediate fix.”
It’s not clear how long the problems will last. Cogeco is looking at new options, such as using web forms or outsourcing, to handle inquiries. Phone messages will be updated more frequently with more detailed information.
“We also invite our customers to consult the FAQs available on our website and discuss with our team of social media agents through private messaging on Facebook and Twitter,” Beausejour said.