Bell hell: Unsupportable support

You might more accurately think of it as Bell Philippines, or Bell India, because that’s where the jobs Canadians should be doing have been exported. And if they were doing a great job—better than Canadians could do—it might be understandable.

By Frank Touby –

While many Canadians are suffering from job losses and an uncertain economic future, homegrown Bell Canada is—some might say unpatriotically—exporting jobs to foreign lands. So unbeknownst to them, Canadians are unwillingly paying foreign aid by losing the chance to earn paycheques with a Canadian company in Canada.

You might more accurately think of it as Bell Philippines, or Bell India, because that’s where the jobs Canadians should be doing have been exported. And if they were doing a great job—better than Canadians could do—it might be understandable.

First of all, if you phone for help from Bell, you’ll discover thanks to a recorded message that there are an extraordinary number of folks needing help at this very instant and you’ll be next on a queue. You’ll be entertained by unwelcome orchestras, interspersed with gaily voiced commercials for Bell this or Bell that.

If you have a question about a bill, you’ll likely be sent to the Philippines where, also very likely, someone who speaks heavily accented approximations of English will take up an extraordinary amount of your time, not quite understand your question, and maybe not be able to explain Ma Bell’s mysteriously worded invoices.

If you get switched to another rep, as will probably happen, you’ll again have to go through the long dance of giving verification information to provide “security” you most likely don’t even care about.

If it’s a question about a charge to your credit card from Bell Credit Services, it could take the better part of an afternoon to get an answer—if at all. And if the Bell billing office rep happens to be in India, you also might hear rapid-fire explanations of various things you don’t ask about as if she/he is reading from a script. And you may be told there is no solution to your problem because you have failed to provide enough information, which of course is because you haven’t been provided with that.

Since Bell India-Philippines-Canada doesn’t know what any of its various tentacles are doing, you’ll find that Mobility has no idea about Sympatico and your phone service is oblivious to either of them.

If it’s technical support for Sympatico you seek, poor you, you’ll probably find yourself shunted off to India where another fast-speaker nicknamed Sidney or Elvis will gladly take up your time, explain things in strange terms and, if you’re lucky, NOT try and sell you some inappropriate additional service that you’ll have to spend another half-day trying to cancel and get removed from your bill.

Of course by that time, Sid or Elvis might have pocketed their commissions and moved on down the hall to another call centre on behalf on another hare-brained Canadian company that thinks cheap is all its customers deserve.