This Show Must Go Off!

Block Roger-Shaw Merger

How much would you charge for 45 minutes of your life?
In my case, I wasn’t even offered the minimum wage.

A few days ago, I received an “exclusive bonus” from Rogers: a text message urged me to sign in to MyRogers account “to claim your gift” of free mobile data.

This was my second encounter of the third kind with Rogers in the last twelve months. The first one took me two hours(!) in total but was reasonably succesful. This time, the overall result was ZERO.

Short sunnary:

1.     The gift offered to me by text message could not be “claimed” as described. I was strongly urged to upgrade my plan even though I’m barely using 10 percent of the bandwidth I’m already paying for.

2.     Rogers’s customer service number is buried deep in the Contact page; you are offered to “Ask the community” or leave “Feedback,” eventually going on a loop.

3.     If reached by phone, Customer Agents are desperately “busy serving other clients”; in no uncertain terms, you are offered to leave your first and second name, and the number to call (all this info already known and confirmed by the answering system).

4.     When you get the callback (with Caller ID “Chatr” and still not human-originated), you have to go through the authentication process one more time.

5.     Finally, the human agent was marginally polite but otherwise notably less capable than ChatGPT: he would put me on hold after every question and, in the end, did not solve any of the questions.

Bottom line:

  • Rogers is a great example of an exceptionally bad performance rooted in a de-facto monopoly.
  • Apparently, their slogan “Our customers come first” indicates where the cost-cutting focus is.
  • Other cost-cutting initiatives must have negatively affected their engineering talent as well: their UX design sucks.
  • Due to market dominance, Rogers can afford to keep the highest rates and report further “productivity gains.”
  • If this is how they maintain their network, we are doomed to have mediocre mobile service at a ridiculously high price. 

Could it get worse? Of course!

Wait till they merge with Shaw.

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IF YOU WANT TO GET BETTER SERVICE, RELIABILITY and EFFICIENCY – and not just “improve shareholder value” that you’ll never see, THE ROGERS-SHAW MERGER MUST BE BLOCKED.

If we remain unconcerned, we may all soon become a by-product of ChatGPT for the Rogerses of this world.