Midyear Telecom Complaints Report Event
CCTS (Commission for Complaints for Telecom-Television Services) released its midyear report (LINK) on the number of customer complaints in Canadian wireless, Internet, residential TV (including satellite), and residential/SMB phone (the CCTS mandate does not cover enterprise services). This report covers the period from August 1, 2020 to January 31, 2021.
Impact: MIXED
As shown in the table below, BCE and Cogeco had good showings in terms of year-over-year decreases in customer complaints, while TELUS once again led the industry on least number of total complaints per 1,000 subscribers.
We add up total subscribers across wireless, Internet, video, and phone lines for each company in order to derive our figure for complaints per 1,000 subscribers. We believe this normalizes the results for scale. For example, BCE always has the largest number of complaints, but it has a much larger overall subscriber base (36% larger than the second biggest telecom provider), so the simple volume of complaints does not provide a good indication of their customer service effectiveness.
Given changes in subscriber definitions over the past couple of years, please note that we use mobile phone subs as opposed to total for TELUS (so we exclude connected devices, given that machines tend not to complain much), and we use Internet plus Ignite TV as a proxy for combined Internet, TV and home phone at Rogers.
Also keep in mind that most of the industry complaints occur in wireless, so Cogeco's results are not a perfect comparison to the other five companies because they have no wireless subscribers.