Service providers often improperly object in complaints process: CCTS

Between Nov. 1, 2018 and Dec. 31, 2019, participating telecom service providers "improperly" objected to 542 customer complaints, and failed to provide complete responses to 931 cases marked as "unresolved," despite a requirement to do so. These figures come from the Commission for Complaints for Telecom-television Services 2019 Compliance Monitoring Report, released Thursday, which analyzed 21,300 complaints made to the commission by customers during the 14 month timeframe. In total, the CCTS says it flagged around 2,700 alleged breaches of its Procedural Code over that time period. In the report, the CCTS identified three trends in the year's complaints procedures. First, the participating service providers — some 273 service providers comprising 384 different brands — improperly responded to complaints that consumers made to the commission. Second, the providers often failed to implement resolutions, recommendations, and decisions. Third, the CCTS said that service providers did "not in good faith in the CCTS' complaint handling process," according to the report. Once the CCTS accepts a customer complaint, a service provider is required to provide both the commission and customer a written response, indicating whether or not the provider objects to the CCTS having accepted the complaint, the complaint remains unresolved, or the complaint is resolved to both parties’ satisfaction. If service providers object to a complaint, the CCTS requires them to do so within 15 days, and to report the complaint as resolved or unresolved within 30 days. According to the report, 20 per cent of compliance breaches were from "improper objections." In these cases, service providers generally breached compliance by providing "merit-based reasons" for the objection, the report said, and asserted that only the CCTS can assess the merit of a given complaint. The report further explains that when service providers report a complaint as unresolved, they must "provide a full and complete written response along with the documents needed to fully investigate the complaint," and that providers are noncompliant when providers fail to provide supporting documentation or do not file a response at all. The CCTS singled out BCE Inc. for submitting responses indicating a complaint was "resolved" when "the complaint clearly had not been resolved to the satisfaction of the customer, with a frequency disproportionate in comparison to other" participating service providers. The CCTS noted that after meeting with Bell, the company reduced the frequency of the issue. Public Interest Advocacy Centre general counsel John Lawford said in the Thursday statement that "we are shocked, but not surprised, at the companies’ variety of non-compliance with a simple complaint resolution scheme for telecom customers.” "Consumers have told us for years that problems exist with the process.” Lawford also pointed to repeated requests from his organization to CCTS “to add a new complaint category for ‘failure to action’ complaint resolutions and that this should be logged and treated as a new complaint, as is done by the Telecommunications Industry Ombudsman in Australia.” — Reporting by Michael Lee-Murphy at mleemurphy@thewirereport.ca and editing by Tim Forster at tforster@thewirereport.ca

Service providers often improperly object in complaints process: CCTS

News | 11/20/2020 5:30 pm EST

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