Wednesday, December 30, 2009

Done Deal, Done Right

Cast ye, if ye will, yer mind back to a time not long past, a time less than two weeks ago, when I posted on the Internet my dissatisfaction with Rogers Communication. This is a follow up story: is it the story of a Christmas Miracle? Well maybe… life itself is a miracle.

Is it the story of small town boy makes big in the big city? No. Is it the story of how, after a 6/10ths of a decade I was able to quit the job that even now sucks my soul dry because I had won the lottery? No.

Is it the story of an attempt to make right a situation which seemed wrong? Yes. Yes it is.

For those of you who are too lazy to go back and read the previous post here’s a short summation: my wife called Rogers to see if we could get upgraded to an Iphone: we were quoted a ridiculously high price that was 3x higher than what Joe Blow walking in off the street could have gotten. Why, we asked ourselves (and the Internet), could someone who hadn’t been with the company get a better deal than someone who’d been with them for 13 years?

About a week ago, my wife, who’d also posted a short blog venting her disappointment with Rogers, received an email from Mary at Rogers. Mary’s job, it seems, is to patrol the Internet looking for just such posts/blogs as ours. Within a couple of days of our blogging, Mary had emailed my wife and said someone from Rogers would be in touch.

I was sceptical myself – it was the holidays after all, and the best of intentions can often get lost along the way. But sure enough, yesterday Owen from Roger’s head office called and left a message. After a very short game of telephone tag, my wife talked with Owen this morning.

He asked about our experience and then gave us the i-phones that we had been wanting at the same low price as Mary Lunchpail and Joe Lunchbox could receive – and we did not need to finish our current plan. All we had to do was to commit to the same 3 year plan that we’d already been on and would had to have signed up for no matter where we went. We also got a pretty sweet monthly plan as well.

A large corporation is kind of like a hydra – it has several heads and often for everyone one head that says one thing another will tell you something else (each person has their own interpretation of company policy, despite the fact that its a policy). But with this many headed, hydra we were obviously referred to one of those heads that was able to think for itself and make the connection that a higher monthly plan payment equals a higher revenue; not to mention that a customer has left equals no revenue whatsoever.

In an ideal world we would have gotten what we wanted right off the start without quibbling; but in my mind, because they acknowledged our complaint and then sought to redress it, Rogers has redeemed itself.

Thank you for listening Rogers.

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