Who you gonna call? N.S. landline customers grapple with poor customer service

When Leif Vernest's landline phone goes down, his family and the quaint farm animal rescue he runs in Nova Scotia's Annapolis Valley are mostly cut off.

Most recently, he spent four weeks without a landline due to an issue with Bell's infrastructure outside the family's two-storey house just outside Berwick, N.S., leaving them without reliable access to essential services like 911.

They deal with rural internet, which is unreliable and goes down throughout the day. There is no cell service.

"It's just very stressful, very unnecessary and it does affect the care of the animals here," said Vernest as a ginger-coloured goat affectionately brushed against his leg in the main walkway of North Mountain Animal Sanctuary.

"We have about 60 animals right now and we need that phone service, and not just for the farm pets … but if there was a medical emergency."

During the outage, the pair did face an emergency. The health of one of their beloved goats — a longtime resident named William John — began to deteriorate. 

Vernest was forced to communicate with his veterinarian via email or drive 10 minutes to find enough service to use his cellphone. His goat, unfortunately, eventually died.

It created a stressful situation that was made worse by what Vernest described as poor customer service from Bell, which continually delayed the restoration of service and ignored pleas to speak with a manager.

Vernest's circumstance is one shared by many rural landline customers CBC News spoke with across Nova Scotia. 

They feel frustrated by what they describe as poor customer service from telecommunications companies and an apparent lack of options for recourse when they are not satisfied with the response to their complaints.

But what many do not realize is there is a free national ombudsman service that provides just that. It's called the Commission for Complaints for Telecom-Television Services (CCTS), and its sole purpose is to help customers get their complaints resolved.

In fact, telecommunications companies are required to direct customers to the organization as part of the complaint escalation process.

But John Lawford, executive director of the Ottawa-based Public Interest Advocacy Centre, said that doesn't always happen.

"We find that many companies don't refer customers to the CCTS," said Lawford, whose non-profit seeks to protect consumer interests in regulated industries such as communications.