Rogers@home offers refunds; disgruntled users remain skeptical

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http://www.ottawacitizen.com/business/001025/4748679.html                      

> Rogers@home offers refunds
> Disgruntled users remain skeptical
>
> Vito Pilieci
> The Ottawa Citizen
>
> Bombarded by countless complaints via phone calls and e-mail,
> Rogers@Home says it has finally fixed its Internet service and is
> ready to begin issuing refunds to thousands of angry Canadians
> who have been inconvenienced.

Count me among the disgruntled... Rogers' cablemodem service has
really sucked lately. There have been several outages per week
for the last few weeks, anywhere from 30 minutes to 6-8 hours
each.

And their customer support people aren't much help; a typical
phone conversation goes something like:

   me: My cablemodem has been offline for two hours; I power
   cycled it an hour ago, but still no worky.

   support: there's a problem with (insert excuse here), it
   should be back online within 24 hours.

   me: 24 hours? When do you really expect it to be up?

   support: might be more like 12 hours

   me: what's the problem? What are you doing to make sure it
   can't happen again?

   support: don't know, sorry

   me: you don't know? Is there someone there that does? Is
   there a supervisor that I can talk to?

   support: no

   me: so, I guess I should switch to DSL?

   support: no, that shouldn't be necessary

   me: your service is regularly unavailable, you can't tell me why,
   and can't tell me who can; what kind of service is that!?

   support: ... (whatever)

I keep meaning to get DSL installed, but I'm never around long
enough to schedule the installation. I don't think I'm going
anywhere in the next few weeks, so I should do that soon.

I'll keep the cablemodem around too in case there are ever problems
with the DSL line; being offline is pretty expensive when you work
from home. (and I'm pretty much useless without a net connection;
all I can do is read and delete mail. Fortunately, most of my
work mailboxes are now smaller than they have been in years.)

remainder of the article:

> And a Rogers official says customers who want a refund for missed
> service no longer have to wait in long phone queues or threaten
> to press charges.
>
> "We are asking customers not to phone the call centre, but (to)
> e-mail us instead, and we will look at each of those (e-mails) on
> a case-by-case basis," said Taanta Gupta, a spokeswoman for
> Rogers@Home.
>
> "These were intermittent problems, and many of our customers were
> not impacted, so we are not going to give a blanket refund; we
> are going to follow our regular credit policy."
>
> Ms. Gupta said that of Rogers@home's 300,000 users, only those
> who log on to the www.rogers.home.com and e-mail customer support
> asking for a credit request will be compensated for their
> downtime.

woohoo, some small fraction of $40.

> "Just outline the issues and we will respond. Those refunds will
> show up on the next bill cycle," Ms. Gupta said.
>
> She also said that, after a weekend of investigation, Rogers
> engineers have finally pinpointed the area that has been causing
> all of the trouble and has fixed those problems.
>
> "The network is now operating very well. The @Home service had
> what we thought were hardware problems, but it turned out to be a
> software issue. Since then we have had no trouble. But we of
> course want to monitor this for the next couple of weeks."
>
> Ms. Gupta's comments did not comfort some Rogers users who
> maintain the Rogers @Home service has had trouble right from the
> start.
>
> "I've been real deep in this since Day 1 with Rogers," said Vince
> MacDonell.  "They do not care at all. It's annoying watching them
> advertise continuously on TV soliciting new business."
>
> After a month of service disruptions, including the inability to
> access e-mail, many Rogers@Home users are questioning whether
> they will continue with the Internet service provider.
>
> "What really ticks me off is that I am paying $40 a month for
> this service," said Paul Renaud. "I just finished running a trace
> for the last 24 hours and I have been getting an outage every 20
> minutes. It's like clockwork."
>
> Many customers feel the problems have been at their worst over
> the past month and, with telephone service waiting times
> stretching to longer than an hour, some users even contemplated
> taking court action against Rogers.

--
Gerald Oskoboiny <[email protected]>
http://impressive.net/people/gerald/

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