Bell ordered to pay Montreal man $1,000 over customer service ‘dysfunction’

A Quebec court has ordered Bell to pay $1,000 to a Montreal man as compensation for poor customer service.

The case pertains to Gilles Tessier, a man who attempted to cancel his satellite TV plan way back in May 2019. At the time, Tessier was told in a phone call that service would be cancelled the next day, but noticed the following month that he had been charged up until mid-July.

Upon calling Bell back on July 2nd, Tessier spent around 75 minutes speaking to six different employees. In addition to being transferred multiple times and having to often repeat the same customer information and reason for his call, he was also hung up on at one point.

This all culminated in a 37-minute conversation in which there was “clearly a complete lack of understanding between the two callers.” As a result, Tessier was then transferred to Bell’s department responsible for new connections — clearly the exact opposite of what he’d been wanting to do — before being redirected one final time to the appropriate division.

Ultimately, Tessier was told the original May cancellation request was indeed in the company’s records, but it hadn’t, for whatever reason, been carried out. Eventually, he was reimbursed the extra fees he was charged and, in 2022, sought $8,000 in a lawsuit against Bell.

Now, Quebec Judge Luc Huppé has ruled in favour of Tessier, albeit by ordering Bell to pay quite a bit less than he was seeking. Upon reviewing the case, Huppé determined that although Bell employees were likely acting in good faith based on their employer’s policies, this nonetheless made the process of cancellation service needlessly complicated and frustrating for Tessier.

“The fact the employees were continuously bouncing the call back and forth without resolving Mr. Tessier’s problem […] points to a dysfunction in the services offered,” said Huppé. He even went so far as to say that this resulted in a “Kafkaesque” experience for Tessier, referring to the nightmarish works of Franz Kafka’s fictional worlds.

Citing the Civil Code of Quebec, Huppé concluded that service providers like Bell must ensure an easy contract cancellation process without imposing “an undue burden on them.”

Header image credit: Shutterstock

Source: The Montreal Gazette Via: iPhone in Canada