Customer disatisfied with Telus problem-solving

By Dan Hilborn
Published Feb. 25, 2004


Former Burnaby city councillor Barbara Der has added her name to the list of Telus customers who are unhappy with the company's current level of customer service.

Der said her frustrations came to the fore last month, after her Telus high-speed Internet service was disrupted for what was supposed to be just a few minutes, but ended up staying out of service for four days due to a series of miscommunications.

Over a period of several weeks, Der was frustrated in her attempts to speak to a Telus customer service representative to find out the cause of the problem and how to prevent it from happening again.

"I'm not happy," Der told the Burnaby NOW on Jan. 20, almost three weeks after her Internet service was first disrupted. "Telus is saying things are up to par now, but my experience tells me it's as bad as ever.

"It's unbelievably frustrating. I wouldn't recommend their service to anyone."

An official with Telus said Der's problem may have arisen because she did not follow the recommended procedure for restarting her computer.

Karen Dosanjh, communications manager for Telus in Burnaby, said about 100 high-speed Internet customers based out of a New Westminster switching area lost their service for "less than half an hour" after a hardware issue knocked out the circuit on Jan. 3.

At that time, Telus advised the affected customers to reactivate their accounts and reboot their computers in order to get back online. Der apparently did not follow the recommended procedure, which was to turn off the computer and restart it, and instead simply left her computer running.

"It was a matter of her computer being left on," Dosanjh said. "Had it been rebooted, she would have been back up and running right away."

Der was incredulous with the explanation, and said she tried repeatedly to get a hold of a Telus customer service rep to find out how to handle the problem, but was unable to get through on the company's phone lines.

Der admits that part of her frustrations come from the fact that she leads a busy life and refuses to wait on hold for longer than 15 minutes. She also admits she is not a computer expert and often needs outside assistance to solve problems.

"The only reason I got any customer service at all is that you, the media, made the call," Der said. "And the guy who did call me back didn't even know that the service had gone down.

"To say that it's all my problem because I left my computer on, I find that appalling."

Der said she became so frustrated with her inability to speak to Telus that she hired a private computer consultant to get her computer up and running.

And she said her biggest complaint today is not that her computer went down, it's the fact that she could not get a Telus customer service rep to help her resolve the problem.

"It's the way I was treated that was most upsetting," she said. "They simply don't have enough people there to answer the questions."