Fun with Rogers Home Phone
I’m having fun with Rogers these days, trying to get my Home Phone service working reliably.
I can’t receive some incoming calls. It’s the “some” part that makes it difficult to diagnose, I suppose, but their process for dealing with this problem has been terrible.
The problem is that certain people can’t call my home phone number. When these people call, instead of ringing the phone at my house, they’re instantly given a message to the effect of “The subscriber you have called has not activated their voice mail”.
It only seems to be Bell customers who get this, and not all Bell customers. I’m guessing there’s an incorrect entry in a database somewhere, but I don’t know enough about how the connection between Bell and Rogers works to even guess.
Problems happen, of course, but the way Rogers is handling it is what’s frustrating.
First time I called, I gave them the information on the problem and they created a ticket. I didn’t hear back from them, so I assumed they’d fixed the problem, until the next time someone told me they tried to call at a time when I was at home. I called Rogers back and they said that they needed more information. Apparently they tried to call me, but there was no answer.
Note to Rogers: If the customer’s problem is that they can’t receive incoming calls, trying to contact them on their home phone number may not work.
So they had closed my ticket. When I called back they asked for some specific information on numbers that had tried to call me and times. I gave them this information and again forgot about the problem.
This morning the problem came up again, so I called Rogers and found out that they had once again closed the ticket. They needed more information. But the information they needed was the information I gave them in the previous call – they somehow failed to pass it on to the people who were trying to solve the problem.
I’ve never worked in a customer service organization, but I expected that you wouldn’t be able to “close” a ticket until the customer had verified that the problem was resolved. In software development, I get to mark a bug as “fixed” but it’s not until the testers verify that it’s fixed that the bug gets marked as “closed”. I don’t even have rights to mark a bug as “closed”. A call center should work the same way.
This time, I’ve given them 24 hours to give me a status update or I’m switching back to Bell (or Vonage or something.. I’ll cross that bridge when I get to it). The threat of losing a customer sometimes lights a fire under their collective bums; we’ll see what happens.
BTW, a shout out to Gabriel Pizza who came in person to verify my pizza order when they needed more information and got no answer calling me. This is one of the ways I found out that people can’t call me.
August 11th, 2007 at 10:26 am
I’m having a similar problem with Rogers:
Any or most Rogers Home Phone subscriber who attempt to call me at home will get a message “this number is not in service”. This problem started to happen when I disconnected my Rogers Home Phone and went back to Bell Canada about 2 years ago and its getting worse as there are about 20 people and associates who cannot call me from their Rogers Home Phone. The interesting part is that I’m able to get calls from any part of the world (Brazil, US, UK, Australia, etc…) as long as the subscriber is not a Rogers Home Phone client.
Rogers has refused to look into my problem as the say I’m not a Rogers Home Phone subscriber anymore and it was impossible to speak to a Rogers Manager about the problem. Never mind that I’m still their client and I expend about $100.00 a month with High Speed Internet and Cable TV. Their suggestion was to get one of my friends, who is a Rogers Home Phone subscriber, to send an investigation request. For now two of my friends have forward my previous emails to them with a complaint as they are uncapable of calling me from their home phone. Their email address in case you care to know is: homephonesupport@rci.rogers.com
Bell Canada has told me that this is a very common problem: Basically when you switch back to Bell or any other company Rogers will keep your phone number in a disconnected state in their switches forever and most or all of your Rogers Home Phone client won’t be able to call you anymore. Apparently the only way to get this resolved is to get Bell Canada to switch your phone number, which will cost you $55.00 and a lot of inconvenience.
I refuse to budge, my next step will be a joint complaint to CRTC as Rogers is basically hijacking our phone numbers.
Good luck to you!
October 31st, 2007 at 11:56 am
I live in Brampton and I’m having the same issue as well with ROGERS.
BELL customers in my own hometown calling area CAN NOT call my home phone, yet ROGERS claims that there is nothing they can do as its a Bell problem, and BELL won’t discuss the problem or try to remedy it because I’m not a BELL customer….
I’m not sure who is worse… but ultimately I’m going to keep calling them to have my account credited until they (either ROGERS or BELL) get off their lazy a**es and fix the problem.
I get calls from any and everyone else, just the Brampton switch seems to not know where to route the phone number! (Really how difficult can it be to fix this problem??)
Soon I’ll probably have no other option but to have a brand new number assigned(since ROGERS never fixes a problem, they only ignore it and hope it goes away) and I’ll have to call up everyone I know to advise them on my new number. (Pain in the a**, I have better things to do with my time)
If anyone knows a way to fix, or had a successful resolution to a similar issue, please post reply!
Thanks
November 5th, 2007 at 6:44 pm
I just started having this problem today. I tried calling home from my work phone and the phone keeps ringing and ringing. Even the voice mail won’t kick in. I then tried calling home on my cell phone and my pick up the phone. I asked here why she didn’t pick up the phone when I called earlier and she told me the phone never rang. Very strange. I tried calling Rogers for an resolution and of course they were useless. I will get a few different people on different phones to try calling me tonight to see if problem is more widespread.
January 16th, 2008 at 12:35 am
My story is even worse; one day I call my home number to discover it has been reassigned by mistake to another house; payments were uptodate; I spoke to Rogers personnel more than 20 times; they open tickets, they cannot find the tickets, they apologize for the inconvenience – I still don’t have my phone back after 45 days. This guys should go back to the drawing board.
February 28th, 2008 at 12:32 am
I have had vonage since may of last year and I have to say customer service has been very nice, polite, asked all the right questions, etc etc, BUT the product they sell is horrible, dropped calls, Sometimes I cant call Shaw customers, noisy calls. etc , etc, tehy have reset my modem many many times, but it keeps coming back, the latest one is the time left on my phone for received calls is about half a day off…Rogers may not be good , but dont switch to Vonage!
February 28th, 2008 at 12:39 am
oops, forget 2 real kickers, The 19.99 intro service for 500 minutes is 500 total minutes , not long distance minutes, Local +Long
May 12th, 2008 at 8:41 pm
Are telemarketing calls from Rogers Cellular driving you crazy? Have you asked them to stop calling yet the calls continue? Have these calls been eating away at your airtime? Are you ready to send a message to Rogers that you’ve had enough? If so, send me your name, cell number and story. We are collecting and forwarding this information to the CRTC and if enough people respond there may be a possibility of a class action lawsuit and / or credits from Rogers to compensate for the abuse of your phone number and wasting your time
Thank You
Mark
kawartha.lakes@yahoo.ca
May 27th, 2008 at 10:48 am
ROGERS HOME PHONE CUSTOMERS: Emergency 911 will NOT work when your Rogers home phone goes down. If you have a fire, if you or your child has a serious accident, YOU WILL NOT BE ABLE TO CALL EMERGENCY if your Rogers phone is not working. And that is often. We joined Rogers 6 months ago. Many, many problems, from radio noise on the phone to the phone cutting out unexpectedly for hours on at least 4 occassions. Recently the phone went down and has been out for 5 days. We have two kids. If there were a serious problem the fire department, ambulance, police could not be contacted using Rogers Home Phone. (We have one cell phone, which I have will away on business.) My wife has to run down to a payphone to call Rogers to come fix it. 5 or six times, at a payphone, wading through the automated ‘support’ service Rogers provides. NOTE: IF YOU LIVE IN A CONDO WITH A BUZZER, DON’T USE ROGERS HOME PHONE. Condo and apartment phones are connected to the buzz code. You will not be able to buzz anyone in while your Rogers Home Phone is down. Repeat: Our Rogers Home Phone has been down for 5 days– no emergency services, unable to buzz anyone in. Rogers was told to buzz a neighbor– on the second day they were to come ‘fix’ (that is, two days of waiting at home for them to come) turns out that the Rogers Phone tech couldn’t get in, because he couldn’t get through to the customer. (He didn’t buzz a neighbor as instructed.) NOTE: IF YOU TAKE BUSINESS CALLS OR MEETINGS AT YOUR OFFICE OR HOME OFFICE, DO NOT USE ROGERS. You will lose valuable business calls if the phone is down for hours or days. You will not be able to let people in. In our live/work building we had an important client party & product sale– no one could get in. NOTE: ROGERS CUSTOMER SERVICE DOESN’T CARE. I had a long call with Rogers Head office about poor service, explaining the situation– continuing problems with phone cutting out, hours, and now DAYS at a time… the upshot was, he would not admit that Rogers provided poor service. (I said if I went to a restaurant and had food with dirty dishes, worms in the food, a waiter who spilled food on me, etc… the owner/manager would come over, ADMIT THERE WAS BAD SERVICE, and correct the problems… replace the food, etc. etc. This guy– who was supposedly a customer service executive– would not even admit that there was bad service. And in the initial part of the conversation, he made it sound that the phone problem was mine. He felt the service that Rogers was providing was perfect. I said that you feel that there is no room for improvement with Rogers services… and he said No. Any company that doesn’t think they need to constantly improve is a company that you should not deal with.
June 11th, 2008 at 7:36 pm
Wow – so glad to see these posts. About to move to a different province and was comparing Bell bundles to Rogers Bundles. Rogers phone sounds SCARY!! No 911 service with a power outage or when the system is (frequently) down?
Good luck changing back to all of you stuck in this situation. I am so sorry you are going through this!
Best wishes…
June 22nd, 2008 at 6:07 pm
Had identical problems recently. It was a nightmare that kept going for 2 months. Another bit of fun in my case came from the fact I had DSL running through the phone line too, so every time Rogers would tinker with anything, I’d lose internet access and need to call my ISP to fix it, which usually required a visit by them as well. In the end, decided to get rid of home phone altogether, but even that has been an (ongoing) nightmare. When Rogers closed my line, my building buzzer stopped working and I can’t let people in. A Rogers technician ended up coming by to fix that, and everything was perfect: no phone line, buzzer working, extended cell phone plan. However, a few days later, the phone line mysteriously became enabled again, and my buzzer stopped working again. Had to call Rogers again to tell them I really DON’T want the phone line, and now I have to wait again for a technician to fix my buzzer somehow. Nightmare.
Rogers is the WORST. It’s almost humorous how bad it is at this point, with still no end in sight, and I’m not even a customer anymore.
September 6th, 2008 at 11:54 am
Do not use Rogers Home Phone if you want reliable service. The phone has stopped working for hours on end. Once for 5 days. More details on the Rogers Home Phone nightmare: http://rogershomephoneservicecomplaints.blogspot.com/
October 24th, 2009 at 5:13 pm
I have one line with Rogers home phone and a second, Rogers home phone for small business. If one line is in use, the other can’t be used. If one line is in use and someone tries to call the other line, the caller gets a ton of static and the person on the original phone hears it. I have to psych myself up to call Rogers because I know it won’t be pretty.