The worst thing that could happen to Bell now
Telus. That’s what. In the interest of full disclosure, I’m a former Telus manager and currently have my landline phone service, internet service and a family wireless plan with them. I’m not particularly happy with cellular costs in Canada, but Telus is generally the best of a bad lot of choices in Canada for telephony services. My telephony service is generally good, and my customer service poor, due in large part to limited carrier selection.
Telus was one of the suitors for Bell Canada Enterprises back in 2007, when a different deal was struck with a consortium headed by Ontario teachers. You can read about the deal in Bell’s own words here. At the time I remember thanking my lucky stars that they went in this direction. Frankly, I can hardly stomach the thought of even worse customer service than I currently receive from Telus.
News stories this week are indicating that the chance of the current bid for Bell going through are pretty much nil now. This is a large, bloated company. Telus is smaller, but more nimble, with a strong market capitalization and high customer retention. This is largely due to very little competition in western Canada. The renewed possibility of a Bell-Telus merger makes the limited competitive landscape that much smaller. Unless you happen to be a big Telus stockholder, this possibility should scare the hell out of you.
Many touch points you have with Telus when seeking customer support are in the Philippines, though the reps with the thick Filipino accents are not supposed to admit it. Outsourcing customer service overseas is in wide practice in many industries and further ‘efficiencies’ and ‘economies of scale’ would only exacerbate this stuff under a merged entity.
I’m not going to regurgitate the guts of this stuff here, as you can Google all the Telus and Bell information you can handle. A few things to keep in mind when thinking of what this would mean:
- even longer support call waits
- a monolithic company in charge of virtually all landline and most wireless service in Canada
- reduced competition resulting in even higher costs to the consumer
- increased likelihood of continued network throttling and spectrum loss
- product offerings based almost entirely on carrier decisions, as opposed to customer demand
I’m not saying this will come to pass, but this development certainly has to have Telus management licking its chops at the possibility. Even with the red herring offer Telus made for Microcell a few years ago, which forced Rogers to acquire the Fido wireless service, there’s only really ever been one competitor that forced Telus to actually, well …. compete for consumer business. Bell.
A deal like this merges things into one massive network that could literally crush Rogers and Shaw. Let’s not even think about the pipe Bell has been building as a result of the $200 million they spent to sponsor the Vancouver 2010 Winter Olympics.
I’d strongly encourage everyone across Canada to watch BCE and Telus carefully. Talk to your MP and the Harper government about just how bad this would be for consumers across Canada.
Possibly related posts
- Severing the Telus umbilical cord
- The worst customer service I’ve ever had
- Digital rights and access under assault
November 27th, 2008 at 11:52 pm
Situation with respect to wireless services is the major problem. Though they are very helpful, the charges levied for them are very high.
December 2nd, 2008 at 4:57 pm
James, thank you for stopping by my photo blog, and thank you for the advise. I have started to put a title to each photo.
I am a business news nut, glad I followed you here, looks interesting!
Sincerely,
Susan Jones
http://tinyurl.com/lj6bo