CCTS shouldn’t be consumer advocate: Bell

Officials from BCE Inc. told a CRTC panel Friday that the mandate of the Commission for Complaints for Telecommunications Services (CCTS) shouldn’t be expanded to allow it to become a consumer advocacy body. Ruby Barber, assistant general counsel of legal and regulatory affairs at Bell, said during the final day of a four-day hearing into the structure and mandate of the CCTS that some interveners “have proposed a different vision for the CCTS. They would like to transform it from an independent, non-partisan industry ombudsman into a consumer advocate that serves as an adversary” to telecommunications companies. She added: “Under this alternative vision, the CCTS would expand its mandate and restructure its board to give more control to consumer agencies.” Changing the CCTS to make it a consumer advocate could “could also significantly reduce its effectiveness and efficiency, as an adversarial relationship with could lead to fewer and slower complaint resolutions,” she said. The CRTC shouldn’t make any major changes to the structure and mandate of the CCTS, Bell argued. It also said the organization doesn’t need to increase public awareness efforts — such as through public service announcements, as the Public Interest Advocacy Centre suggested during the hearing — as Canadians can easily find information about the CCTS by searching online. The company added that promotional efforts through PSAs or other mass advertising campaigns could lead to customers to bypassing their telecom company and going directly to the CCTS with their complaints. Bell’s comment echoed similar statements made by representatives from Shaw Communications Inc. and Rogers Communications Inc. during the hearing earlier in the week. Shaw, according to a written copy of its opening statement, referred to calls during the hearing that asked for the CCTS to “cover broad new areas, such as bundled features, content, equipment and accessibility,” and said the organization should “be wary of expanding its mandate in a manner that would undermine the original intent and the role it currently plays so effectively.” It added that regulatory bodies, such as the CRTC and Competition Bureau, already oversee some of those areas, including “advertising, programming, regulated wholesale services and accessibility.” Shaw argued it would “be inappropriate and inefficient to expand the ombudsman mandate to become quasi-regulatory, overlapping with the jurisdiction of administrative agencies that have statutory accountabilities.” The company also said existing tools to make customers aware of the CCTS are sufficient, and taking additional steps to promote the organization could confuse customers, while Rogers agreed that there is no need for additional spending on promotional activities. Rogers emphasized in its appearance that the CCTS should be a last resort for customer complaints, and that telecoms should always have a chance to review complaints first. It gave the example of the Ombudsman for Banking Services and Investments, which requires, before accepting a complaint, that a customer present a letter from their banking institution stating it reviewed the complaint but could not reach a resolution. “Based on our internal information, we have determined that there is a significant number of clients who go directly to the CCTS without first raising their complaint with Rogers,” the company argued in a text of its opening statement. “While the majority of these customers are redirected back to us, it is only after work has been done by both Rogers and the CCTS. We are losing a valuable opportunity to earn back the trust of consumers in large quantities every year.” CCTS, which appeared first earlier in the week, also had a chance to reply to others’ presentations on the final day of the hearing. CCTS commissioner Howard Maker repeated his call to the CRTC not to change the commission’s mandate. “We cannot stress enough the importance to our role as an independent and impartial ombudsman the need to refrain from adding to our mandate any role that involves advocacy or setting standards for the industry in its relationship to any particular group or interest,” he said. Maker also addressed Rogers’ argument, stating that the CCTS, as it stands, does not accept complaints before the telecoms have “a reasonable opportunity to resolve the issue directly with a customer,” and noted that under the system Rogers suggested, customers would have to go through as many as four levels within an organization in order to exhaust telecoms’ complaints processes. Maker also addressed the issue of promotion, arguing that CCTS requires telecoms to “to provide information about, and a link to CCTS, at logical and easy to access locations on their websites,” as well as return specific results in searches on its website that use certain keywords. Maker said few telecoms have fully met this obligation. “The fact that so few providers fully comply raises questions about compliance more broadly, to say nothing of the impact of this non-compliance on public awareness and consumer rights of recourse.” He said even more important is the obligation for telecoms to tell customers with unresolved complaints about CCTS. “Most tell us that they do it, but our customer survey results appear to indicate otherwise and we have no window into processes to determine whether they are actually complying with the requirement,” Maker said. — With reporting by Anja Karadeglija at akarad@thewirereport.ca and editing by Derek Abma at dabma@thewirereport.ca

CCTS shouldn’t be consumer advocate: Bell

News | November 6, 2015

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CCTS shouldn’t be consumer advocate: Bell

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