Stephan Bevan’s Blog

Our Internet Service Provider is Bell Sympatico (a division of Bell Canada).

We make a full-time living off the internet (if you do too, make sure you read the last paragraph), and yesterday our internet went down.

We have been with Bell Sympatico since 2008. For some reason we had to get a second line in order to use Sympatico, so now we have two lines. Yesterday early afternoon, our line 1 went down, which brought down our internet on line 2 – why I don’t know- line 2 worked but not Sympatico. They scheduled a repairman to come out that evening between 5pm-9pm to fix the phone but no one showed.  We called again to say it didn’t matter how late, that they could still come. Still no one.

In the wee hours of the morning, I called Bell again and I was told the tech from last night said it would have taken too long ???? so the appointment got cancelled, so they booked again for a 9am-12pm that morning appointment, and assured me it would be fixed then. We called again at 9am to make sure someone was still coming, and they still assured us that someone would be there between 9am-12pm. Upon calling at 9:30am (I was determined to call every 1/2 hour until it was fixed) I was told that there was no appointment booked by Bell Canada or Bell Sympatico and that they would TRY to make it for the afternoon 1pm-5pm. So, it appeared as if Bell had cancelled 2 appointments on us, on their own, without telling us. I feel lied to. Whether intentional or not, the result is the same – no service. Every time I called BELL CANADA I either got someone in Bell India (named John or Bob) or Bell Philippines, that gave me the same lip-service over and over. This got to be extremely frustrating as you could imagine, because no one there had ANY ability to make ANY difference to our situation. I could have done a whole renovation job from the nails I could have spat. HEY BELL CANADA – your outsourcing tech support is not working! I even tried calling French tech support, but I guess they’re not required to be bi-lingual anymore -uuh merci beaucoup, bye bye. At 9:30am, I starting telling the Bell agents that we were advanced internet marketers and that for every 15 minutes our internet was not fixed, that I would post our experience once somewhere on the internet. Nobody cared because we were always talking to someone in a call center in the Philippines or India. If you’re reading this, it’s one post of 96. They finally showed up 25 hours after our first call in. Anyone who knows me knows I’m a mild -mannered guy, but by that time I could have built a whole sub-division with those nails.

We live in a rural area. We used to have wireless internet, but when Bell Sympatico came along in 2008, we signed up with them because it was much faster. Unfortunately because of where we are located, there are no other decent alternatives for internet access (other than wireless -too slow & satellite – way too expensive).

It would seem that Bell Canada & Bell Sympatico has 3 shifts of in the field tech support 9am-12pm, 1-5pm, 5-9pm, and we kept getting shifted to the next shift. I believe they outsource most of their field tech support to other companies. So, this is clearly a case of not enough field tech support.

You know, all this might be OK if this were the only issue we had with Bell, but we have had many similar instances of their poor customer service. One example is when their version of the “Turbo Stick” came out (Internet Anywhere), we signed up for a promotion of $10/month, FOREVER (unless you go over in bandwidth – fine), but when we received our bill, they had always charged us $40, so every month we had to call them back to get it fixed, with the same response “Sir we don’t offer a program for $10/month”, so we had to speak to a manager to get it fixed – if they even knew what we were talking about. Finally after calling in month after month to get our bill fixed (telling them we signed up for $10 but getting charged $40 every month), my wife just decided to cancel the service altogether, to save her sanity. So with all the issues we’ve had with Bell, we would love to have an alternative for phone & internet but not available in our area – so far we’ve only been able to find another carrier to take over our 1-800# (which cost about 3-4X less a month than with Bell).

In Canada there are a bunch of  monopolies, but in the most profitable Industries: automotive, banking, energy and communications (to name a few), we have what are called Syndicates: these are small group of individuals (organizations) that control these top sectors. That’s because the government has granted the control of these

industries to a few companies, and other companies are squeezed out of those markets. So there are few options to Canadians when it comes to these services, and obviously where it comes to customer service, you get what you get, and just pray you don’t ever have to call.  I realize that technical issues happen with all service providers, but within large companies, there seems to be little value placed on great customer service anymore. If you want good service, you need to turn to the smaller companies that care about each and every client. In the least, to empathize with the client rather than reading the same regurgitated “we’re terribly sorry for the inconvenience sir” line off a script. If you are a business owner, in whatever you do, if you want to survive and thrive, make great customer service your priority.

Why is it that these large companies like Rogers, Microsoft, and Bell Canada, etc. have outsourced ALL their customer service to places like India & the Philippines in an attempt to increase profits, but have not in turn offered cheaper or better services as a result of their increased profits. “Oh, but it’s all about the shareholders…” No, it’s because “the love of money is the root of all evil,” as the Bible says.

If your living is dependent on the internet, I suggest that you DO NOT rely on just 1 ISP, but  get a redundant ISP system, such as a dual-wan router, and have a backup ISP

connection, so that if one service goes down, it will automatically switch to the other. Also get USPs (uninterruptible power supplies) to have time to back up your data during an outage (they’re also a good idea to protect all your electronics from lightning spikes). Get a separate USP for your router & modem so you can still use a laptop if the power goes out, without other things draining that battery’s power, like monitors and speakers. We used to have redundant ISPs but at the time it was cost prohibitive because our options were limited. However after this fiasco with Bell Canada & Bell Sympatico, we probably just need to bite the bullet and get both, so that we don’t have to spend 15 hours with just 1 ISP’s tech support (and have to learn a whole new language in the process), but can still get work done while our supposed HIGHEST PRIORITY SUPPORT TICKET gets shifted to the next day.

The result – it was eventually fixed the next day, and they gave us a two-day discount (only after we demanded it). Not at all what I was expecting, but then again, what could I expect from Bell Sympatico and Bell Canada.