Joe M. writes:

Sprint Canada provides the toll-free service for the company I work for and has been for as long as I can remember. As a value-added service, they provide flexible call routing features which they call “Time of Day” and “Day of Year”, which allow us to vary the terminating number depending on the date and time. We use this to roll the toll-free number over to a cell-phone that alternates between our service staff, and it is handy for holidays.

For years this service has just worked. I call about a week in advance to make any changes from our regular schedule. I call again about 2 days in advance to confirm that the changes are in place. For years this worked fine.

In July of 2005, Rogers Canada took over that side of the business and it hasn’t been the same since.

There have been 5 holidays since the time Rogers took over. On these holidays they would either forget to implement the alternate routing or they would forget to reset it after the holiday, leaving our toll-free number going to a single cell during regular business hours. This leads to excessive usage on the cell phone and inevitable missed calls.

Unfortunately, getting any “emergency” changes to the routing made takes in excess of 4 hours.

Whenever we make one of these holiday changes, I take down operator information just in case. In each case when we called to notify them that they fucked it all up, we are unable to contact these operators and have to explain the situation to a new person, it gets old quick. Repeated calls to managers aren’t returned. Calls to sales-staff end with “it’s a free service, what do you expect?” I expect them to make the service operate as advertised and give me an explanation when they drop the ball on it.

In the 5 screw-ups, we’ve only been compensated once, after two weeks of daily calls to the call center, explaining the problem each time to new operators. I have other things to worry about, and babysitting Sprint/Rogers is not one of them.

All we want from Sprint/Rogers is a real explanation for why they can’t seem to get this service to work anymore and some sort of acknowledgement that their screw-ups cost us money and cause a great amount of aggravation.

We’ve researched offerings from other companies and the cost is excessive. As we are currently looking to upgrade our internal phone system from an ancient Norstar Compact DR5, we are looking for one that offers some sort of flexible call routing based on date & time so we can finally kick Sprint/Rogers out.

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