Just about everything is quick on the internet unless you’re a Canadian and have a complaint about a telecommunications giant.
For those who thought that the new complaints commission in Canada was a marvelous plan that would go off without a hitch, they may want to hit the back button on this next story. A CBC reporter wanted to find out how effective the Commissioner for Complaints for Telecommunications Services (CCTS), so he spent 8 months to investigate and recorded the results and, to the casual observer, the results don’t exactly appear to show a road paved with gold.
From the report:
The CCTS was set up to protect consumers in the wake of deregulation of the industry and a subsequent declawing of the Canadian Radio-television and Television Commission. It continues to be an obscure organization, largely because a promotional campaign, demanded months ago by the CRTC, has yet to materialize.
It has also taken heat from those who are actually aware of its existence because it is funded and partly run by the telecommunications service providers themselves.
Every company earning more than $10 million a year in revenue is required to be a member of the CCTS, which is governed by a seven-member board — three of which come from the industry. As such, there have been suggestions that the agency is ineffectual.
How effective is the CCTS? In its first year, it fielded 5,000 inquiries, with less than half accepted as matters for investigations. Australia’s comparable and well-publicized agency, the Telecommunications Industry Ombudsman, handled 100,000 complaints over the same time in a country two-thirds the size of Canada.
What followed was a diary detailing exactly how the process worked. There was a slight change in his two year contract without his notice and when he asked, they covertly changed him over to a plan with less value while selling it as a better deal. Since this technically broke his contract, he went through the process of filing a complaint to the CCTS. No problem, right? What ensued was four months forth of hoop jumping just to ultimately cancel his account – and people thought spending over 5 minutes cancelling their AOL account was an absolute nightmare.
The conclusion drawn up from all of this seemed to be that customers are, for the most part, on their own when it comes to the contracts and that the system is great if you have enough energy to spend four months jumping through hoops (and, of course, you know what you are doing by reading through the legal contracts you sign up for to find the flaws in the first place)
While the reporter clearly had the energy to get through the process, the average citizen in Canada might not be so lucky. Still, the diary makes for an enlightening read.
