Canadians are complaining more about every part of their home technology – wireless services, internet, television and local telephone services – the industry’s consumer dispute resolver said in its 2023-24 annual report.
Canadians also complained more about their service providers, but complained about Rogers most of all.
The Commission for Complaints for Telecom-Television Services (CCTS) reported an overall increase of 38 per cent in consumer complaints over the 12 months ending July 31, 2024. But because complaints can include multiple issues, the overall number of issues was 38,874, nearly twice the 20,147 complaints accepted.
The report provided multiple breakdowns of those complaints and issues, by product, by provider and by type of complaint. It reported 88 per cent of complaints were successfully resolved, roughly in line with previous years.
By provider, all three national organizations (Rogers, Bell and TELUS) experienced a larger rise in complaints than for the overall industry. Rogers complaints were up 68%, TELUS’ up 53% and Bell’s up 46%. Rogers had the most significant increase, and now has a 36% portion of the all accepted complaints. Bell has 24% of accepted complaints.
CCTS noted ‘significant changes’ to its complaint-handling processes meant it took less time to assess and accept customer complaints and more complaints are now resolved earlier in the process.
By type of service, wireless continued to have the most complaints, but there was a larger percentage increase in internet (up 50%) and television (up 46%). It was the first increase in television-related complaints in four years.
By type of issue, billing remains the top issue overall, and in all service types except local telephones. For local phone customers, service delivery concerns were most common.
The report noted customers reporting many more problems cancelling their service or transferring services to a different provider. Consumers also raised more concerns about cancellation fees, across all products.
The report also showed grim results of industry efforts to inform consumers about CCTS, created in 2007 to handle complaints that are not resolved with the service provider.
Only 10% of complainants said their provider informed them about CCTS during their complaint discussions, the same as last year. Similarly. 20% recalled seeing CCTS information on invoices (up from 17% last year) and 29% saw notices about CCTS on their provider’s web site (30% last year.) Also 51% of complainants reported going through three or more levels of complaint with the provider before contacting CCTS (down from 55%). Nearly half (44%) said it took them more than two months of dealing with the provider before they contacted CCTS.
CCTS also evaluates service provider conduct based on four mandatory CRTC codes of conduct. It found 46 breaches of the Wireless Code, down from 48, with TELUS having the most (12). There were 12 breaches of the Internet Code (up from 8), and four breaches of the Television Service Provider Code (down from 14).