Have tips for navigating telecom customer service? We want to hear from you. Click the “Join the Conversation” button above. On the app? Join here.
The offer seemed straightforward. In early January 2026, a Bell chat agent promised Vicki Sloot that if she upgraded to a new Bell Fibe TV box, she could keep all her specialty programming sports channels like TSN and Sportsnet. Plus, she’d be paying $5 less a month.
The next day, her new equipment arrived — but she was missing the speciality channels. She went back to Bell, who told her she only had a “basic starter plan” and that it’d be an extra $25 a month to get them back.
So began an eight-week odyssey through Bell’s customer service department, consisting of hours spent live chatting and on the phone with different agents, and an eventual escalation to Bell’s resolutions team.
“It’s impossible to get a single right answer that is consistent throughout each support agent,” said Sloot, who lives in Toronto.
Sloot is one of more than a dozen customers with whom Marketplace has spoken who say they are frustrated with the poor customer service they received from Canada’s big three telecoms: Rogers, Bell and Telus. Complaints include long hold times, multiple transfers and escalations, dropped calls and overall poor communication, which can make seemingly simple issues take days or weeks to get sorted.
Employees at two of the largest telecom companies, Rogers and Telus, told Marketplace that frontline customer service representatives have less incentive to help issue credits or lower bills, and said they’re measured on their abilities to increase customers’ bills.
It comes as complaints against telecoms reached an all-time high last year, with more than 23,000 complaints filed with the Commission for Complaints for Telecom-television Services (CCTS), the majority of them relating to billing issues like incorrect monthly charges and missing credits. Meanwhile, in Spain, a new law is looking to cap how long customers have to wait when addressing similar issues — and some say Canada should take note.
“Things are getting continuously harder for customers to resolve issues,” said Mohammed Halabi, the founder and director of MyBillsAreHigh.com, who’s been negotiating with the major Canadian telecoms on behalf of his clients for 20 years.
“They’re exhausted.”
‘The system is designed to frustrate as many people as possible’
Sloot was one of several telecom customers Marketplace documented as they tried to get resolution to their telecom troubles one day in late January. By then, a resolution manager had been assigned to her case, and the live chat and general customer service agents told her they were unable to help. She had a brief call with the manager, who promised to look into her problem and get back to her.
“I am locked into this one agent, I can’t do anything else,” said Sloot.
Read More: Customers complain about long wait times, multiple calls to resolve issues
