One of the leading Canadian Internet, Cable TV, and Mobile providers Rogers has garnered negative feedbacks about its customer service in magazine articles published online within 18 months. This paper examines three recent publications that criticize Rogers customer service delivery with the aim to help the company focus on improvement of its customer services and effectively address the mentioned issues. First, the summary and analysis of the article “Q&A: Why Rogers Internet Customers Raged When Cut Off” by Mark Gollom is provided. Second, the paper centers on the article “9 Ways Rogers Communications Delivers Terrible Customer Service through Social Media” by David Hall. Third, the article “Rogers’ Twitter Tactic Backfires as Customers Use Hashtag to Vent about Lousy Service” by Ashante Infantry Business Reporter is summarized and analysed. Finally, the paper discusses what personal skills of its employees could be of the greatest benefit to Rogers.
The key topic of “Q&A: Why Rogers Internet Customers Raged When Cut Off” by Mark Gollom is the outrage expressed by Rogers customers at the Internet service outage in January 2013. Gollom looks deep in the problem examining the reasons of people getting so furious when their Internet is out. Based on the interview with Aimee Morrison, a professor from the University of Waterloo who investigates the digital media, Gollom makes the point that the outrage was a direct cause of people’s grown online-dependence. Many everyday activities are underpinned by the Internet use, besides people have developed a constant wish to be connected all the time. So when they lose the opportunity to use the Internet, they reflexively check what has happened. The article exposes the importance of the Internet in people’s everyday life and implies that many people are addicted to it. This means that the very Internet service is of the same importance as, say, some kind of a drug to a drug addict. Respectively, the customer service should be caring very well, with focus on the customers’ frustrated condition.
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Second, David Hall’s “9 Ways Rogers Communications Delivers Terrible Customer Service through Social Media” provides consistent criticism of Rogers’ customer service with numerous examples taken from real encounters with Rogers. Besides, the article is widely commented by the general public, whose comments provide even greater support to Hall’s claims. For a start, Hall reports that his attempts to have his issue resolved took 5 days and multiple efforts. Yet, they did not lead to anything. Hall was actually to blame himself for the blackout in Rogers service, he got to know in the end. The article focuses on how the customer support system in the company mishandled Hall’s issue using the social media.
In a clear and logical manner, Hall lists 9 areas which needs improvement so that Rogers could improve its customer service, in particular the customer care program launched in the social media. These are inability to fix the problem; disinterest in the solution to the problem found by the customer; lack of apologies for the issue; blaming the outage on the customer; lack of compensation offers; non-responsiveness; bouncing customers around to several customer service representatives; lack of knowledge of the user; trying to get the complaints conversation offline. The analysis of the article enables to identify serious drawbacks in Rogers customer service to its social media customers. Besides, the issues raised by the author relate not just to staff’s incompetency, but to their deliberate procrastination in dealing with the issue; and lack of humane attitude. It becomes obvious that the way of handling the issue by customer service is prompted by the underlying customer care management policy, which is supported within the company.
Third, the article “Rogers’ Twitter Tactic Backfires as Customers Use Hashtag to Vent about Lousy Service” by Ashante Infantry Business Reporter focuses on the lack of success of Roger’s Twitter tactic. When Rogers launched a new promotional hashtag on Twitter – #Rogers1Number – hoping to stimulate users to discuss and celebrate Rogers One Number, it did not predict that that step would lead to the opposite. Responding to the tagline “1 is the only number you’ll need” people just vented their frustration with the gigantic communications corporation. Specifically, the following complaints were published on Twitter: Rogers overbilled its customers for lengthy periods and did not apologize for that, Rogers’ support staff was rude, Rogers provided low quality Internet connection (cuts out every 10 minutes). Only few comments were positive, which means that the campaign the Rogers paid for (to have its hashtag staying on the top of the trending topics list for 24 hours) worked against its public image. The analysis of the article reveals that the two biggest concerns that customers express are unsatisfying customer service and low quality of provider services. Even the user that mentioned having been overbilled emphasized the failure of the customer service to handle this issue in a humane manner (“Still haven’t heard a sorry”) (Ashante Infantry Business Reporter, “Rogers’ Twitter Tactic Backfires as Customers Use Hashtag to Vent about Lousy Service”)
The analysis of the three articles above has helped identify key areas of concern in relation to the customer service quality at Rogers. The company may benefit from this review by focusing its attention on providing improved customer care, both in relation to the social media and Internet services. In particular, the staff need to be trained to display a more respectful, attentive, and humane attitude towards customers; while dealing with resolving technical issues, attention should be paid to staff competency in identifying and resolving the issue, as well as to possible compensations for serious drawbacks in service delivery. Besides, the policy of apologies should be enhanced as people would often feel insulted by the lack of these. Finally, the psychological underpinnings of the customer concerns should be explained to the staff focusing on the importance of the Internet for the customers.
Last but not least, if I were to work at the Customer Service Department at Rogers I would make every effort to show my genuine concern about the problems faced by the customers. To achieve the best result, I would need to apply my skills of interpersonal communication, high technical competency, decision making, and problem solving.
