Bad...nay....stupid....customer service at the Source with a little good news from MVR

I just received this email from reader Sharon about her experience at the Source in the Avalon Mall:

"I just found your blog. What you are doing is a public service! So
here's my story...

Last night I went to the Source at the Avalon Mall to buy a printer.
One of the guys "helping" me picked out a USB cable. So off I went
home only to find that the cable he had given me was an extension
cable and not a USB cable. When I called the Source they were not at
all apologetic. Actually, they didn't seem to care.

Did I mention that I don't have a set of wheels? So today I got myself
back on a bus and went back out to the Source to exchange the
incorrect cable. When I got there, I handed over my receipt, was told
the cable I needed was slightly more expensive, paid the difference
and was given back a receipt. Only when I got home did I realize that
the cashier hadn't returned my original receipt...you know...the one
with the printer purchase on it. So now I have to get back on a bus
and make a THIRD trip to the mall in order to get my receipt for the
printer.

Not only are the staff at the Source complete muppets, they are also
rude and unhelpful. During a previous visit to purchase a phone, my
husband overheard one of the staff members being rude and dismissive
to an elderly lady who was trying to make a purchase.

I am never, ever, ever shopping at the Source again.

On the plus side, I had a lovely experience at the vehicle
registration office today. The woman behind the counter (didn't get
her name, sadly) was efficient and helpful and it was by far the least
painful red tape I've encountered in a long, long time."

Anyone else have stories about difficult return/exchange transactions?

Poorservice - I'm sending Hanlon Realty a link to a course in email etiquette

My boyfriend purchased a condo nearly five years ago with the assistance of Hanlon Realty, and we last corresponded with one of their agents about two years ago. So, you can imagine our surprise this evening when we each received an email from the owner, inviting us to their upcoming customer appreciation party. We won't attend the party, and we won't do business with Hanlon Realty again. Perhaps many of the hundreds of customers and business partners who have just had their email addresses distributed publicly to all Hanlon Realty's contacts won't either.

Yes, that's right, enough email addresses and names in the "To" field that Google documents wouldn't let me paste the list into a spreadsheet in one shot. To quote my boyfriend after he read the email, "I feel violated." And then some well-placed adjectival expletives.

Sure, they're offering to enter us into a draw for cruise, but they are also opening our email addresses up to a barrage of offers for penis enlargements, Nigerian inheritances, and a whiter smile. Come on, this is 2010. You need to know how to use BCC by now. To handle your customers' personal information with such disregard for privacy is simply terrible service, not to mention plain stupid. I mean, people don't generally give out their fake email to their real estate agent; this shit is going to primary (in many cases, business) addresses. Just shocking.

Anyway, I just replied to the email and asked to be removed from their contact lists. I bet I'm not the only one doing that tonight.

Apparently, it doesn't matter which television provider you use!

From about three months before we moved out of the condo and right up until the week before Christmas, our television set up was a beautiful, new, wall-mounted 42" LCD screen with a safety pin poked into the cable input so I could watch Here & Now and Land & Sea, and my 'stories' (not that I watch them every day - it's just an occasional guilty pleasure, like my grandma used to say of her once-weekly Another World fix, "just watch long enough to see what Rachel is up to").

Anyway, the point is that we now have Bell ExpressVu satellite and I couldn't care less. I'm a fairly passive TV user and I manage to acquire everything I really want to see from the internet, so having a million channels to choose from is not that important to me. However, since I'm paying for a service, I expect to get it, no exceptions. Dawn, a reader who had some difficulty with getting that service from Aliant TV, seems to feel the same way. Here's her story:

"I came home from work on a Friday only to find out I had no TV service. I tried rebooting my system a few times and still had no luck so I called the support line. They again ran through the reboot system with me and still no luck. I was advised they could only have someone come to my house on Monday morning. I said it was not acceptable as I had to go to work, and asked if something else could be arranged. The agent advised that he could get someone there on Saturday, and asked what time I would like them to be there. I said before 12 would be great.

Saturday morning I stayed home (I only get two days off as I work all week), but by 11:30 no one had showed, so I decided to call in and verify the appointment. I got another
agent who advised me that I was booked for Monday morning and nowhere on the ticket report was Saturday morning showing. I was dumbfounded and went through
the whole conversation that I had the night before. I advised I would be working Monday morning, but my husband would be home in the afternoon, so they could send someone by then.

I made it through the weekend without TV which is very hard for me as I am a TV junky!

On Monday, I picked my husband up at the airport - he had just gotten off a flight after working a nightshift. I advised him he would have to stay up as the repair
guy from Aliant would be coming to fix the cable that afternoon. I called home about 3:30 pm and I was advised that no one had shown up yet. I called
in to Aliant again, only to be told that my appointment had been cancelled, as the problem is fixed. I told them my TV still did not work and wondered why, if my problem had been
fixed, someone hadn’t contacted me to see if I had service. The agent was silent and then told me that the next appointment available was Tuesday afternoon. Guess what? No one showed on Tuesday, either. By this time, I was getting to the point where it was just too funny to talk about it. Each time I talked to someone different. Each time I was told this
was not their normal service and each time a different agent screwed up.

It got to the point where my husband called, got really angry with them and something finally got done on Wednesday. This really pissed me off even more as I was being nice
and got nothing done. He called and got nasty and got something done. What is wrong with the world?

I have to say it was a little too late; at that point I had already called Rogers and made an appointment for them to come and hook us up.

Thanks to the poor service of Aliant TV, they also lost the phone and internet service I had with them.

Oh, and a month later I received a bill saying I owe them $400 as I did not return my receiver boxes for the TV. They had been dropped to the Aliant store on Stavanger Dr about three weeks before. I had kept the receipt copy so I called in once again to clear things up.

I am now a happy Rogers' customer !!!!!"

How's that for balancing the heat we put on Rogers last week?

Poorservice - LeGrow's Travel Village Mall

I've been doing a lot of research online in preparation for booking a vacation this spring. I think I've read every review of every hotel in every destination that I'm interested in, and I've been combing the discount travel and airline sites, signing up for their incentive programs and newsletters so I don't miss any opportunity to save a few $ in the process. I've narrowed it down to a few places but figured I'd go out and talk to a travel agent before booking anything, since I had to go to the Village Mall after work yesterday anyhow.

When you look in the door of LeGrow's as you walk past, it looks exactly like you think a travel agency should look like, right down to the lighted palm tree cutouts. The customer service I received there, however, was not what I was expecting.

I waited about five minutes for the agent to finish up with a client on the telephone and then she called me over to sit at her desk. She was friendly and seemed eager to help at first, but as I told her about the vacation I was looking for, she received a phonecall. I was a little annoyed when she answered the call, but she immediately said, "I'm with someone right now, can I call you back?" I thought that was acceptable enough and continued. She gave me a book from Air Canada Vacations (who you might remember from this post) and pointed out a couple of resorts that she thought I might be interested in, quoting me a price between $1500 and $2500 per person. Considering the high cost compared to what I'd been seeing online, this would have been a significant purchase for me and a significant sale for her. So, when the phone rang again with this potential $5K sale on the table, I figured she would let it ring out or at least tell this caller the same thing she told the last.

Not the case. She answered it, and in spite of saying that she was with a customer at her desk, continued on the phone call. I was left sitting at her desk with a brochure for a bunch of (overpriced) vacations that I had already seen online. I gave her the benefit of the doubt and sat politely for a minute or two, but then she actually stood up and left her desk and started digging through filing cabinets, going into the back office, all the way chatting with this telephone customer who was obviously also a personal friend or extremely familiar client. I tried to signal to her but gave up after about five minutes and walked out the door. Needless to say, I won't be booking with LeGrow's and I also likely won't be giving Air Canada Vacations an opportunity to redeem themselves in my eyes, if this is the kind of service you get from their affiliates. Back to the internets, I guess.

Letter from a Rogers dodger

I received this story from a reader and then heard about the same problem on the CBC morning show earlier today. The problem seems to be not just that customers have been left without television service, but that the customer service reps at Rogers seem to have been totally unprepared to field customer questions about a so-called "known issue". Hopefully now that the story has hit the media, Rogers will be quicker to resolve, but really, should paying customers have to wait for Jeff Gilhooly to call them out before publicly addressing such a widespread issue?

"Roger's cable service in Corner Brook and area has been horrible since at least the end of August. I don't have Rogers myself, but my parents do. I've noticed over the Christmas break that no matter where I was, cable from Rogers had poor sound - it would drop off for a few seconds at a time making it difficult to enjoy a program. This was constant for hours on end. Also, the picture has been breaking up. I've seen this at friends' houses and relatives' houses when I visited.

In fact, there was an article in the Western Star regarding this a couple weeks ago. http://www.thewesternstar.com/index.cfm?sid=313866&sc=23

I called Rogers and the first person I spoke to told me that they were not experiencing any problems in the Corner Brook area and it must be with the service at my parents house. I explained that every one is complaining about it and that I saw the same problems at a number of friends and relatives. Still, she insisted that she can't do anything about other people's service, they have to call in as well. She wanted me to wait at home all day for a tech to come and check out my service. I explained to her that there was an article in the local newspaper that named a representative of Rogers who said they WERE aware of the problem. I asked to speak to a supervisor who said she's look into it and get back to me. She did in fact get back to me and confirmed that they are aware of the problem "for some time" and are working to resolve it. She had no idea how long it will take.

I can understand that things can break, and problems arise, but this problem has been going on for FOUR months! Come on! This is Rogers. It's their business. I can understand if Rogers was a brand new company offering cable tv for the first time. But this is four months and counting now with no estimation for resolution!

I've also discovered today, that Rogers cable tv in St John's has been very poor - a lot of missing channels, guide feature not working, poor audio and picture coming and going since around Christmas day. This seems to be a huge problem with Rogers in multiple areas of the province and they keep saying they are aware of a problem with no known time for solution.

I had a beef with Rogers when they started enforcing their cap on internet and at that time, I disconnected all of my services with them. I'm definitely glad I did seeing the trouble with them now."

You can find the podcast of the CBC morning show spot here: http://podcast.cbc.ca/mp3/nlstjohnmorn_20100106_25341.mp3