In the two years since Canada's national wireless code of conduct came into force, improving customer service has become a crucial focus for the country's biggest carriers and a new report suggests they are making some headway with that task.
Keeping subscribers happy makes sense from a public relations standpoint and it's also cheaper than wooing new customers with subsidies and discounts in a maturing market for wireless services.
The federal Commissioner for Complaints for Telecommunications Services (CCTS) said in a report Wednesday that it accepted 9,988 complaints in the year ended July 31, down 12 per cent from 11,340 last year.
Commissioner Howard Maker said that while there could be other factors contributing to the decline in complaints, it's one piece of evidence that the customer experience is improving.
"I do think service providers are aware of their CCTS complaint numbers – and I mean at senior levels, they're aware. Service providers have told us, 'We're trying to keep our numbers down,'" he added in an interview. "They do know this is something that attracts attention and they don't want to come out on the wrong side of that story."
Improvement among the biggest offenders
Ottawa-based CCTS, which is funded by the industry but acts independently of it, tracks complaints about wireless, Internet and home telephone services. It does not handle complaints about television service, but its mandate is expected to expand to include that shortly. Not surprisingly, it receives the most complaints from customers of Canada's biggest players, particularly the national cellular providers.
Some familiar trends emerged this year, as BCE Inc.'s Bell Canada once again topped the list with the most complaints at 3,599, down 1.4 per cent from last year. Also as with last year, Rogers Communications Inc. was next, but was down almost 24 per cent from the previous year at 1,814 complaints.
Those numbers do not include other wireless brands operated by the companies and Bell-owned Virgin Mobile and Rogers' Fido brand were also in the top five, with more than 600 complaints each.
Despite the smaller proportional drop in complaints, Bell spokesman Jason Laszlo said the company "has made significant investments to improve customer service and we're gaining traction." He added that "with new training programs and projects like our enhanced customer invoices, we're seeing a 17-per-cent reduction in CCTS level complaints so far this year."
Meanwhile, Telus Corp., which has made good customer service a point of pride for several years, attracted just 466 complaints, down 28.6 per cent from last year. Its discount wireless brand Koodo had 175 complaints.
"We're an organization that's obsessed with customer service," said David Fuller, president of Telus consumer and small business solutions. He said he was happy to see the "sustained improvements" year over year but added that the "ultimate goal is to bring our complaints down to zero."
There were more than 260 service providers and brands that participated with the CCTS as of July 31, the vast majority of which were responsible for up to just a handful of complaints each.
Relationship between CCTS and telecom providers
The CCTS has told providers it is willing to work with them to better understand and improve the process. "Many – although not all – have taken us up on that," Mr. Maker said. "We have regular calls with many of the service providers to talk about particular cases or particular issues or processes."
"Sometimes that bears fruit. Rogers is a great example. This year, in an environment in which complaints were down 12 per cent, they were down double that. And that's because they consciously made an effort to work with us co-operatively and get these things done," he added.
Rogers' chief customer officer Deepak Khandelwal says the company is trying to make it "easy for customers to do business with us," adding: "This work won't be done overnight, but we are committed to radically improving customer service and today's results show we're on the right track."
Wireless complaints down, Internet on the rise
"This is the first-ever reduction in the proportion of wireless complaints," Mr. Maker said, noting that they accounted for 53 per cent of the total this year, down from more than 60 per cent for the past four years. He speculated it could be due to customers receiving better disclosure and clear information up front about services thanks to the national wireless code, which has been in force for two years.
Meanwhile, complaints about Internet services were up on a proportional basis, and while it is not clear exactly why, Mr. Maker said complaints related to data usage are common. "What's a gigabyte? It's hard to figure out. We get a lot of complaints saying, 'No way I used 200 gigs.'"
Wind Mobile and wireless code breaches
Wind Mobile Corp. – which sells wireless services in urban areas of Ontario, British Columbia and Alberta – attracted 702 complaints, up 37.6 per cent from last year, and was the only smaller company in the top five.
Wind had 422 breaches of the wireless code last year, the majority of which were related to one plan introduced in mid-2014 that included unlimited roaming in the United States for a flat monthly rate. Customers complained that they had their service cut off after what Wind said was "excessive usage" in accordance with its "fair use" policy.
Mr. Maker said customers were not informed of limits on use of the service but after working with the CCTS on the issue, Wind has subsequently updated its policy to clearly disclose those limits.
"The incidence of breaches since this incident has been much, much lower and totalled fewer than 10 in the quarter to October, 2015," said Wind Mobile's chief customer officer Glen Campbell. "We do take our obligations under the wireless code seriously and we do take pride in providing high-quality customer service."