Well, it's day three now and I've spent at least 6 hours on the phone trying to get a problem with my account sorted out.
The situation is that we are set up to have up to seven (7) lines on our account and already have six (6) active. For some reason I couldn't add the seventh line. Odd. I spent hours yesterday trying to find out what was wrong (calls to support kept dropping etc). The first line support were great, but they couldn't work out what was wrong. Finally at the end of the day, one of the supervisors managed to work out that there was a seventh line hiding somewhere in our account from Rogers. Where the hell had this come from? This was not showing up at the front of the system but was preventing us from adding the line. A ticket was raised for the back office to look at the problem. I hung on as we need this line working, but was told that they couldn't escalate the problem any further.
Now, the situation is that I needed to get the line working yesterday and now I'm up against a rock as the drop-dead time for getting this working is today (we have to have the phone working for the weekend). Unfortunately after talking with an agent this morning and spending another half an hour on the line with a supervisor, I was told that there was no way I could talk to management further up the line and they could only arrange a call back within 72 hours. The supervisor then disconnected the call after declining to put me through their manager as they were "unable to change the required procedures". Everyone was polite and nice during this and there were no raised voices. As I type, my phone is still showing a connected call, but the line is dead ...
So, here we are with a problem that isn't created by either Fido or me that I'm not allowed to have a solution to and not allowed to talk to someone further up the chain about. I've been cut off and prevented from getting this fixed. I know I'm being insistent, but it shoudn't take days to get these problems solved. I know that a chirpy, happy sounding support agent will answer to this post, but my question is:
What are the management doing about this kind of thing and why aren't they responding to such situations?
When I was an IT support manager, if a customer was having an urgent problem and a supervisor was stuck with the procedure, I would call the customer back personally as soon as I could to try and work through the problem. When I say "as soon as I could" I mean minutes, not days. My reasoning behind this was that if the supervisor couldn't fix it, then the problem might be something that was endemic in the system and I needed to make sure it didn't cause problems for other customers or elsewhere in the system processes.
It seems that things have changed and the personal touch is no longer an option. The system fails and management won't actively help fix it. They pass it on to a "72 hour call back" procedure and wash their hands of it. Or at least, that's the perception that the customer is getting. Customer perceptions are everything aren't they?
In another post I wrote, I urged Fido to take the brave step of being more personal with their service and show the industry a better way of helping customers. Again, today's problem is another example of procedures and systems getting in the way of fixing the problem and being impersonal to the customer. Let's face it, the corporation doesn't really care about the customers (or do they? Show us some action?).
Now, if anyone in management wants to help me fix the problem I'd be really grateful if they'd get in touch as we have a movie to shoot starting on Tuesday and it would be great if we could put Fido in the "with thanks to ..." credits.
Thanks,
A
