Resident shares concerns with customer service

ers from being served, and hung up.

at 9:30pm), and we were the only chasers around to see it because every other chaser group gave up!

August 31st, 2022

This day ended up being one of the most active and crazier days of the Eastern Ontario storm season last year. Storms initiated early in the day, around 1:00pm, first along the Seaway near Brockville. Naturally, I was in position for these storms, as I did expect to have a good day after I did my severe weather forecast the day before and the morning of.

The first round of storms were all very close together and difficult to navigate through, as I kept getting caught in rain without visibility of the storm. I did eventually get between two storms though, and followed one from the town of Lyn, Ontario to Mallorytown, Ontario. Difficult chase area there too, with the St. Lawrence River, trees, and the road network. Nonetheless, after watching one storm rotate and then come straight over me, I drove towards another storm just down the road. What I rolled up on is still to this day one of my favourite storm scenes ever. The backside of this storm was just so beautifully ridiculous.

All that puffiness to the clouds is the updraft of the storm going up into the atmosphere. I was just lucky enough to be in the right place at the right time, with railroad tracks in the foreground, to take that photo.

A local resident’s recent customer service concerns add to growing complaints both locally and nationally that businesses – particularly large utility companies – don’t always treat their customers fairly. The issue for Kemptville resident Donna Blendell and her neighbours began on the afternoon of May 18, when they began having issues with their Bell internet.

Donna and her neighbours were fi rst told that service would take just one day to restore, before this promise was eventually bumped to a disappointing one of having service restored in about a week.

“The unbelievable lack of customer service has been mind blowing,” said Donna. “Equally insulting is that in the chat, they tell me I can check outages on the MyBell account. If I login to the MyBell account they actually list my internet service as fine with no outages.”

Donna ended up having to speak to a customer service manager in a call that lasted 1 hour and 45 minutes. She says that an agent kept coming back on the line to tell her that she would receive a call back in 48 hours. She insisted several times on speaking with someone today, but the agent eventually gave up, told Donna that she was preventing other custom-

Donna pointed out that the neighbourhood she lives in is largely a “work from home” community, which makes an internet outage a big deal. “The good news is that if you are with Bell Mobility, they will give you 50 GB of data right now, but for the rest of us we don't even get a sorry,” Donna added.

Donna’s story grew the following day, when she suggested that someone who lives on her street who works in the telecommunications industry “called in some big favours” to get the Bell crew dispatched a few days after the outage, instead of a week. This is when she was told that the internet lines were damaged during nearby construction.

This was frustrating to learn because it’s what Donna and her neighbours suspected all along, but she claims that Bell customer service representatives would not listen when they tried to explain.

Bell has made some attempts to provide compensation, but Donna does not feel it goes far enough. “I was told by a loyalty manager to buy my own data for another mobile plan and when all was said and done they would review for reimbursement,” said Donna. “I had to call the other carrier and they graciously took care of me.” But Donna later found out that Bell could have added the data to the other carrier on her behalf, as the two companies are related.

As for a service refund, Donna says that Bell is offering compensation prorated to outage time. “I did provide feedback that their employees can only read scripts, have no analytical thinking and absolutely no listening skills and that applies as well to a lot of managers who aren't doing much of anything,” Donna added. “Let's face it, they don't have listening skills so I am sure it will go nowhere.”

As of the time of writing, a temporary fix had been applied, but Donna was not holding her breath for the permanent planned repairs.