The Commission for Complaints for Telecom-Television Services (CCTS) released its first annual review of the complaint management of Canadian wireless, internet, phone and subscription television services.
The CCTS 2019 Compliance Monitoring Report does not review the overall level or types of consumer complaints it received, but rather how well the service providers managed the complaints process and promoted the public awareness plan. As 2019 is the first complete year for this review, there are no comparisons for prior years.
The lack of comparative figures makes it difficult to identify progress on complaint management, but the report did highlight some trends. The trends included service providers improperly responding to complaints, failing to implement resolutions, recommendations and decisions and some members “not participating in good faith” in the CCTS complaint handling breaches.
When a complaint reaches CCTS, the service provider has to respond to a CCTS query to find out whether the complaint is unresolved, resolved or out of scope for the CCTS (they use the term “objections”). The CCTS noted 542 improper “objections”, 931 incomplete responses to “unresolved” complaints and particular problem with Bell Canada submitting “resolved” responses “when the complaint clearly had not been resolved to the satisfaction of the customer.” CCTS worked with Bell to address this problem after it emerged later in the year.
CCTS also noted major non-compliance issues with some providers threatening to charge consumers fees or sue them for filing complaints with CCTS.
The report is also designed to measure how well participants carry out the Public Awareness Plan, through required messaging on web sites, invoices and during escalation processes. Roughly half of the major suppliers failed to properly promote the availability of CCTS complaint handling and resolution services on their web sites.
The CCTS provides free, independent and impartial service to customers of about 270 service providers. It also provides twice-annual reports on consumer complaints.