Rogers clients complain of customer service nightmare, spending hours on hold to resolve simple issues

When Anil Sedha decided to cancel his Rogers business internet service, he expected he’d go online, click a few buttons and be done. But the customer support link was broken. A chatbot told him he could only cancel by calling. 

Thus began what the Winnipeg man estimates was a seven hour ordeal spread over several weeks last summer, trapped in a maze of hold music, dropped calls and endless transfers between departments.

“It was a non-stop theme of ‘We are having a heavy call volume,’ ” said Sedha. “I tried calling at different times of the day and on different days.”

No matter when he tried, he says the outcome was the same: hours waiting, speaking to representatives who couldn’t help, being disconnected mid-call and starting all over again. 

“How many days am I expected to call someone just to cancel a simple internet service?” he asked.

Sedha’s experience isn’t unique. Dozens of unhappy Rogers customers have recently written Go Public and posted on social media, complaining about long wait times, complicated cancellation procedures and poor service. 

Many question recent Rogers call centre layoffs and complain about how three major providers — Rogers, Bell and Telus — dominate the industry. Together, they control the majority of the country's mobile, TV and internet market, a problem critics say was made more severe when Rogers was allowed to take over Shaw in 2023.

Customer service experts say this lack of competition is precisely the problem. 

“It reduces the need for these telcos to compete and to provide good customer service because they think, ‘Customers need us, so we don't really need to do anything to improve our service,’ ” said Eugene Chan, an associate professor at the Ted Rogers School of Management at Toronto Metropolitan University.

A spokesperson for Rogers declined to speak on-camera, but said in a statement that the company has millions of customer interactions every month and works hard “to deliver a great experience.”

While customers complain about poor customer service, Rogers appears to be reducing the number of people who handle those calls.

The company recently ended its contract with Foundever, a Miami-based company that employed hundreds of Canadians who handled Rogers customer service calls. Neither Rogers nor Foundever will say exactly how many people were laid off, or whether those positions were moved elsewhere.

Two former employees who lost their jobs in those layoffs say they were told in staff meetings that Rogers, like so many other large corporations, is “driving digital adoption” — which they believe means more use of AI. 

Both said that much of their time in the past year was spent training AI systems.