I am having the most aggravating time dealing with Videotron right now. Videotron is the television cable monopoly provider here in Montreal, for those who don’t know; and really, for people like me who don’t have either a private home or an apartment with a balcony facing South, they are the entertainment monopoly that has to be dealt with, for lack of alternatives. And boy, do they know it.Most people already know what a monopoly is (the sole provider for a certain class of goods in a given area) and, at least in Canada, have more or less grudgingly come to accept it as an inevitability of life, much like death and exhorbitant taxes.
So why do monopolies feel that they must tax our patience so? one would be tempted to think that those who control these monopolies are sadists at heart, and indeed it often feels that way. This is most obvious when wrestling with Videotron’s counter-intuitive, non-functioning “self-service” web site.
Case in point: last Friday I’m trying to change my cable channel lineup. On top of my regular service I have 20 additional channels that have to be chosen one by one. So I go to the self-service web site and make the changes. It takes me a while, of course, because the grid is rather bizarrely broken up into 5 pages and alphabetically-listed — you’d rather expect that the selection grid would be done by channel position, but that would be much too obvious. Not being familiar with the channels I don’t have (duh) I spent a good deal of time investigating them. It takes me just short of an hour, but I have my new 20 channels lined up. While I’m there I also select the Discovery HD channel, which for $ome rea$on now has to be chosen and paid for individually from the other HD channels.
So, I go to the confirmation page, click to confirm, and voila! Nothing.
That’s right. No changes went through. Not a one. One hour wasted.
To add insult to injury, I can’t access the channel selection grid now because the system claims that there is a change pending in the system. You see, Videotron seems to use technology powered by a hamster spinning a wheel. A customer can only make one change in one day. And when I say “one day”, I mean, in calculus terms, “for very large values of ‘one day'”. Changes don’t appear to “go through” late Fridays, or at any point in the weekend. Or even Monday. I’m jealous now. I wish I could take four-day weekends whenever I want, but I don’t have that luxury, not being a monopoly.
I promptly sent a message of complaint about this. Videotron helpfully… aah, who am I kidding, they didn’t do shit. Apparently my transaction got lost in the ether somehow. Maybe the hamster wasn’t paying attention and stopped spinning the wheel while I made my order. So much for customer service.
Still, I plod on undeterred. Maybe the server had issues with sessions; I’ve been in the web business for long enough to know that things don’t always work as intended. I tried again tonight to make almost the same same changes. I decided that this time I would only change my 20-channel selection, and wait another day for the new HD channel. There’s no sense mixing things up and risking session issues again.
So, I did just that. I only changed the channel lineup. Made my selections again, went through the confirmation screen, confirmed, and ta-da! Nothing. Again. This time I noticed that the less-than-helpful “to complete this transaction please contact customer service” on the last page I visited. Once again Videotron has made their claim to “self-service” a fraud, a lie. Once again they failed to deliver on an implicit promise that they web site would actually work. For me, it’s another 20 minutes wasted. Typical experience at the hands of a company that seems to think that you need to be there for them and not the other way around.
And really, this all goes back to the monopoly idea. A monopoly is a company that you really have no choice but to deal with. The problem is, that the monopoly knows that you don’t have any alternatives. As such they know that they can get away with providing bad customer service, and often that’s what ends up happening, because of the impression that it’s less expensive to not take good care of your customers. After all, it costs money to, for example, hire enough telephone operators to handle as many calls as you think you’ll have. Insofar as you’re providing a service that most (if not all) people have to get from you, why not have less operators and let people be put on hold? Why not hire 10% of the operators and force your users to go through an unintuitive and aggravating automated answering service instead?
Or, in this case, why bother making sure that your self-service web application actually works? That can be expensive and require regular maintenance. On the other hand, if your self-service web site doesn’t work, that makes it more difficult for the user to cancel unwanted service and ultimately pay you less per month than they did before! Increasingly I’m getting the impression that this is what’s really happening. I might be cancelling one more channel than I am choosing, and this would result in a lower cost per month for me, and so Videotron has decided to make the process as complicated as they can in order to prevent it. I’m sure it’s nothing personal. They probably try the exact same scam on everyone who’s trying to cancel or reduce their services. This way they can keep charging the larger amount.
Well, they’re in for a surprise. The joke’s on them, really. I’m really tired of fighting them, and so I’ve decided that their services are REALLY going to cost me less per month. For one thing I’m definitely not getting the new HD channel ($4/month). I’ll also be trimming my channel selection from 20 to 10 (another $6-8/month), but the bulk of the savings will come from my downgrading my cable internet service from the “Extreme” package to the “high-speed” one (almost $30/month savings).
So, that’s about $40 less per month. I’ll be saving almost $500 a year. That’s the cost of annoying me as a customer. That’s the cost of providing poor customer service. If Videotron thinks that people can be annoyed into keeping services they don’t really want, they’re due for a wakeup call. I may have no choice but to deal with them, but I’ll be making damn sure that I deal with them less, and keep more of my own cash for myself.