Customer service redux

It's a good thing my wife shaved my head again last night - I'd be pulling what's left of the hair I have out by now. I'm listening to my father talk to yet another Bell "Canada" call centre employee in India. He's been having nothing but trouble with his Bell ExpressVu setup (which is why I am quite happy with my problem-free Rogers cable setup at home). Whenever he tries to get some help from the technical support department of Bell "Canada", he ends up getting transferred to a country on the other side of the planet.

Sometimes there's a language barrier. Most of the time, it seems that the "first level technical support" robots - I mean technicians - don't seem to know a television from a computer monitor. This one was just trying to tell my father that the TV was on the "wrong setting"... how one can screw up putting a television to channel 73, I have no idea. Where was this tech going? Nobody knows.

Aside from cutting costs (while cutting quality of service - but who cares... it's just a customer), what possible benefit is there to BCE or Bell Canada or whatever they're called? Watching my father struggle with this company has convinced me that I will never, ever, do business with them. Considering that I spend around $1,500 a year on television services, over the next 50 years (assuming the price never goes up - right - and that I live that long), that's $75,000 in lost revenues. Of course, bringing economic factors into consideration, that sum will likely exceed a quarter of a million dollars in cable services alone in my lifetime.

I know they don't care... they only seem to care that quarterly profit earnings continue to inch or skyrocket upwards.

To be honest, Rogers isn't much better, but I seem to remember spending 62 minutes activating a friend's digital box, going in circles with Rogers techs... but they were located somewhere outside Toronto. Maple Leafs aside, I have little against people who live there. At least Rogers is keeping its money here in Canada, investing in the economic area in which it operates. What does Bell "Canada" do in India?

Outsourcing is proving to be a real dud. We're not the only ones complaining here in Canada - US residents are losing jobs to Mexico, China and countless other places every day. What outsourcing technical support to India gets Bell and what Mattel, Fisher Price and other toy companies (or just about every remaining product manufacturing company in the world) get from outsourcing manufacturing to China where standards wouldn't meet those we had here in the 70's, I cannot fathom. Toys are being recalled... dog food killed family pets... Chinese WHEAT (why we import WHEAT from China I can't understand - what's wrong with Saskatchewan?!) has been tainted too...

It's time we bring our product and service industries back home. There's nothing wrong with "Made in Canada" or "Made in the USA" - and what's happened to Taiwan anyway? Didn't they make everything a few years back? What's it going to take for corporate fat cats to realize that the buying public is as important, if not more important, as are earnings reports.

We supposedly have the power. Let's refine it and wield it... come on, Canada!!