Dear Rogers Customer Service

[ I wrote this letter to Rogers after I couldn't change my address on their website. It was the final straw in a string of events stretching back over a year. As of yet I have received no formal response, which I consider quite inadequate given my good spelling and level of outrage. Perhaps I am being melodramatic. I hope it amuses someone. ]

This is my final attempt to express to Rogers that I am unhappy with your services, and I feel that I have exhausted all other avenues of complaint. Your customer service is pathetic, your website doesn’t work, and when I try to get you to correct a mistake you made, I am treated as coldly and distantly as if I haven’t been giving you hundreds of dollars a month for over a decade. I have tried (in vain) to try to express to Rogers that I am tired of being treated like a revenue stream instead of a human being. Your policies, packages and customer service seem fully geared to maximize revenue and minimize human satisfaction.

This did not happen over night, or over one single incident. I have been a dissatisfied customer for almost TWO YEARS. Before, I was a good-standing customer with over $400 a month being spent on all four of your core services: HDPVR+Movie Network, Ultimate Internet, iPhone+DataPlan AND Home Phone. Now I have just one service, my iPhone. My contract expires in 2011 and at this point I am seriously considering paying to get out now, except that my principles won’t allow me to pay extra money when YOU are at fault.

My descent into this madness happened when I added – that’s right added – some cable channels to my package. “Somehow” (that is the official explanation given), this generated an automatic credit check which they told me wasn’t supposed to happen, yet could not reverse (but at least they said they were sorry). Because my bill was overdue at the time (I was unemployed at the time and my previous payment was late) you placed me in the “high risk” category. Then a credit limit MAGICALLY appeared (according to your CS people it was automatic and they could not remove it). Now I understand you can’t have people running around with huge unpaid balances, but you set my limit to…$400. Which was LESS than my MONTHLY BILL. How is than an intelligent move?

Here’s where it gets absurd, on a level I have never encountered before. The credit limit is applied against my “current” balance, not when it’s actually due. Let’s just go over that again. The charge isn’t DUE. I don’t even have a BILL mailed to me yet. I don’t KNOW I owe you this money, it’s just “in the system”. So without knowing it or even being aware my services would be automatically cut off EVERY SINGLE MONTH, just for monthly recurring charges for REGULAR SERVICES. After several months of having to make last-minute credit card payments over the phone just to get my phone services restored, I thought I had the system figured out. But wait, it gets worse!

As previously stated, as soon as a charge is put into the system it counts against my credit limit. But this applies to “extra” fees such as long distance calls and PPV movies, too! So on more than one occasion a long-distance phone call has caused me to creep over the limit and BAM, phone gets cut off, please phone Rogers. This is RIDICULOUS. I PAY MY BILLS. You are punishing me for using the very services you provide! This leads me to have to call your CS department(s) constantly, which in itself is a stupid, frustrating process.

“Customer Service” (very loose quotations) at Rogers is a nightmare. The automated phone system is a joke. I have NEVER even once gotten to the department that I actually needed. Then I have to endure transfer after transfer, as none of your HUMAN staff seem to be able to get me to the department I actually need either. It is not uncommon to be transferred four or five different times before finally reaching the person that can do the simple task I am calling for! No one seems to ever know where to transfer me, yet everyone always promises that the next transfer will be the leap that finally gets me home. After waiting on hold and then telling the new person all of my verification information - AGAIN – I am told “No, sorry, wrong department” and placed back into the cue. The last time I called to change my address it took over 90 minutes. Do you really think that is an acceptable amount of time to do something so trivial? When I get frustrated and ask to speak to a manager, I’m told that the person I’m speaking to IS the manager. Really? Every time? Come on, even I know that trick. It’s dishonest and unfitting of a corporation of your size.

The best part of my calls to CS are when they try to plug the website so I don’t have to call them. Your website is a joke; a very broken, frustrating joke. I can’t change my address, I can’t change my wireless plan, I can’t even do basic functions. It’s almost comically dysfunctional. I HAVE added accounts to my online profile. I’m LOOKING at it on the screen. Why tell me I can change my account settings and then TELL ME IT’S NOT REGISTERED. This is BASIC user functionality that should have been working from the start. The end result is that EVERY SINGLE FUNCTION that I have tried to do on MyRogers has failed, and I am again forced to again call your incompetent customer service. A company as large as Rogers should make sure that before their representatives push something, they should verify that they can actually use it!

These are just a few stellar examples of the incompetence and greed that seems to be the hallmarks of Rogers. I am beyond upset, I am outraged. But despite my expressing my unhappiness to every single person I have ever spoken to at Rogers, no one seems to be able to do anything about it. I want out. I want out NOW. But, alas, I have a contract to fulfil or cancel, and I refuse to pay to get out on principle. YOU are the problem, why should I pay extra to be free of you? It’s like paying a bully to stop beating me.

I hope that some day a competent person will contact me and actually help me, but I’m not going to count on it. For now I continue to whittle away at my services, contented only in knowing that by June 2011 my bill will finally reach zero. I know you don’t care about $400 a month (obviously since you’ve done everything in your power to make me want to leave), but to me that is a significant amount of money and I expect some reasonable service level for that level. It will be nice to never again have to hear automated phone personality “Jeff” tell me it doesn’t understand what I’m asking for. I wanted “customer service”, but I guess it doesn’t know what that is? It seems very appropriate, as none of your human employees know what customer service is either.