How Many of Your Customers Feel Stuck With You?

At least they are consistently unbelievable! After this post Anthony via @TelusSupport chimed in on twitter offering to help me, only I would need to describe my problem in under 140 characters. He said he did not have a direct line for me to call him, nor could he call me. I declined his ridiculous offer and then he asked that I reconsider and requested that I send direct message him on twitter. So I did, twice, but no response, however once I re-tweeted my blog post he then chimed in again asking once again how he could help, when I replied that he had not answered my direct messages he said he did not receive them (this is when he had an open twitter audience). Finally he called me, I guess he can indeed make calls after all. I said that I had never heard of direct messages getting lost on twitter before to which he shared that he did in fact receive them. So he CAN makes calls and he DID receive my direct messages! He then went on to explain that under no circumstances does Telus allow customers to be excused from their contract but that he thinks there is now a work around to my issue... but it’s too late for that, what good is it for me to have duplicate services, I already had to go with Rogers when Telus would not help me for over a year! He said he would need to have someone else call me and publicly tweeted that they would call me the next morning as they were too busy that afternoon. Well they did not call the next morning, they called at 7pm the next evening when I was out. They promised to call back yesterday and they did not. My believability issues with Telus have gone from bad to worse. Telus practices classic “lipstick on a pig” customer care, but in this case even their lipstick has worn off. I’m guessing Telus created a support twitter handle simply to keep up with the Jones, their staff are clearly not empowered to help their customers, nor are they motivated to want to.

Thanks Craig. I typically prefer to focus on the opportunity to improve customer experience, I think it is fair to assume that most of my readers appreciate the significance of authentic customer experiences, and while there is a massive opportunity for a smart company to completely reinvent the telecom customer experience what we are stuck with today is painfully unethical. I did indeed hear back from Telus yesterday and spent well over another hour talking to them only to remain stuck. Why? because "we don't want to encourage customers to leave us, and if we allow this for you, that is what we would be essentially doing". First I spoke with "Candy", who had zero authority to help me and was incredibly rude, I then spoke to her manager "Logan" who was much friendlier but insisted that contracts cannot be terminated under ANY circumstances without paying the cancellation fee of $400 (for a service that never worked)... but what he could do was credit me for the past 3 months as a gesture to recognize my frustrations. Beyond exhausted from this nonsense I accepted his offer and have once again given up on any hope to find resolution to this case. Logan did suggest that I "sell" my contract, which was such a powerful reflection of his own moral compass, I cannot imagine passing this off onto some other innocent customer. Bottom line: Telus is a company without values, without integrity and as a result, zero customer loyalty. Their economic profits are merely a reflection of no better alternatives, that will simply not sustain. I will no return my focus back to helping smart companies create rich customer experiences, that is much more fun!