Online hari-kari

I have a Rogers Canada account.  Why I don’t know, they’re certainly not deserving of it. With $3.0b in revenue, predominately from consumers, you’d think they’d mastered how to provide their customers with a web portal. Sadly, they haven’t.

For the last month, I’ve been trying to access my account online and each time I’m greeting with the text “We are currently experiencing problems accessing your account. Please try again later.” Later would seem to be something on the order of 1 month. So I decided to charge Rogers some money and called their customer support line. Figure on a good day it’s costing them $.80 a minute to talk to a customer. Since I wasn’t planning on giving them more money, clearly my call would be at a loss to them.

The hapless customer service rep clearly had heard my complaint before, likely hundreds of times, he explained that yes they were having a problem, yes they knew about and no, he had no idea when it would get solved. You know you’re having serious trouble when you create a special graphic image to say you’re having a website problem. His recommendation, which clearly wasn’t part of his script, was to try access my account “early in the morning or late at night”. So there you have it, Roger Canada has one of the best online portals provided you only want to use during specific hours.

Another month has passed and I was left wondering how many thousands of customers had called with this problem. Figure my call at $0.80 per minute for 5 minutes cost them $4.00. Rogers Wireless has 6.2 million wireless subscribers and figure worse case, perhaps 5% of them have called, so this has cost Rogers something on the order of $8 million.

Now a month later, I’m seeing the same messages, my immediate thoughts are these guys are a bunch of idiots, if they can’t run a website, god only knows how they run the wireless network. I’ve thoroughly enjoying telling all my friends my experience with Rogers with the ending recommendation, don’t buy, if you did, switch.

Likely the executive team, busy enjoying the 3 weeks of Toronto summer, are clueless that they’ve been advertising daily to about 310k subscribers (5% of their total), that they really don’t know and really don’t care. In likelihood, some senior manager in a cubicle is charged with the website and he/she lacks the internal power to authorize the use of force to get it fixed. So it remains broken.

The senior manager works for a Director who works for an Asst Vice President works for a Vice President who works for the General Manager who works for the President. Somewhere along this long (probably not very far), they stopped caring. So I will switch and say good bye to Rogers, sure I won’t be missed.