Bell Fails Again!

- jim Young

“Next time you get bad service, speak up. Remember: It’s your money you are defending - money you worked hard for. Tell the company and others. Use the internet and social media. That’s how customer service will improve for us.” - Larry Winget

The remote control for our Bell Receiver has been acting up for some time, so I logged into My Bell to request a replacement.

I’ve been putting off making the request because I dreaded contacting Bell. It seems that even getting simple things resolved turns into a bigger issue with Bell than it needs to be. As it turns out, I was not wrong.

After a few minutes chatting with their virtual assistant, I was finally put through to a live person.

Of course that meant explaining (all over again) what the problem was.The chat assistant Richell then had to take a minute to pull up my account. After waiting almost a minute a message popped up on the chat screen indicating that after 5 minutes of no activity the chat would end unless I sent a message to keep it alive.

So now, it’s MY responsibility to keep the Chat active while the chat assistant is doing whatever it was that she was doing?

 

What the heck. It wasn’t as if I was doing anything other than waiting patiently for Richell to get back to me anyway.

Thankfully, it turned out to be a moot point as the chat assistant was gone for less than five minutes. When she came back Richell needed to validate that I was authorised to make this request. Fair enough. I guess they get a lot of prank calls requesting replacements for remote controls.

 

 

As requested I provided 3 pieces of information, the Date of Birth of both my wife and I, our One Bill Account Number and our contact phone number.

Apparently that was not enough. Richell also needed a FOURTH piece of information - our 4-digit pin. Isn’t that a little excessive just to verify my account?

After providing our pin, Richelle THEN advised she was sending me an email which I had to respond to to make certain it was really me making this request.

  

When I asked Richell why, she advised that the information I provided on my account was not available. 

So I asked Richell why the information I provided was not available and she clarified the Date of Birth was missing.

 

I later checked to see our Date of Birth is not only NOT in our profile, there isn’t even a field for it. And really, why would our age be required for Bell’s accounting records anyway? So why was Bell asking for a Date of Birth to validate my authenticity in the first place? 

And why was knowing my account number AND pin number not sufficient to prove who I was? If Bell had “call display” they would already be able to verify I was calling from the phone number that THEY had assigned me.

The time stamp on my chat transcript indicates that Chat lasted 39 minutes. But I wasn’t able to resolve our issue in that time frame with Richell and was on the phone with her supervisor for a good 40 minutes after that.

All this just to get a replacement remote control. Why does everything including something as simple as obtaining a replacement remote control have to be an issue with Bell?

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