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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.
Marketplace followed Vicki Sloot as she tried to resolve an issue through Bell’s customer service chat, phone agents and resolution team.
Sloot waited three hours for a call back that never came. Amas Tenumah is an Oklahoma City based author and customer service expert who consults companies on their customer service practices.
“Make no mistakes: There’s no hold music, but [she’s] also on hold there, too,” he said about Sloot.
Tenumah believes Bell is following a pattern he has seen many times before. “The system is designed to frustrate as many people as possible,” he said. “Part of the design is that people will give up so that [companies] don’t have to incur that expense.”
Sloot’s issue remained unresolved, and she eventually gave up and paid more to get the specialty channels back. After Marketplace reached out to Bell about Sloot’s case, the company gave her a $90 credit and a $30 discount on her monthly bills moving forward.
In a statement, Bell acknowledged she had to take more steps than necessary to rectify the issue.
“We strive to make it easier for our customers to do business with Bell and in this instance, we did not live up to our customer commitments,” said communications director Ellen Murphy.
However, she said, “the assertion that we have deliberately designed our customer operations to avoid resolving issues is just simply not true.”
Reps encouraged to increase customer’s bills: insiders
It’s not just consumers who are frustrated — some telecom employees are, too. Marketplace has spoken confidentially to several current employees of Telus and Rogers, whose identities we are concealing because they fear professional repercussions.
Marketplace spoke to a Rogers worker who takes escalation calls and supports frontline agents. He said those employees’ ability to help customers, including by issuing credits, is “decreasing constantly.”
He said he’s noticed more agents calling him with basic questions, for example, around how the autopay credit or the financing promotion programs work.
Rogers is raising its U.S. long-distance rates to $1 per minute for customers without a plan after Bell and Telus recently hiked their roaming fees. The increases come at a time when Ottawa is pushing for more affordable prices.
“They don’t have very much experience or knowledge of what to do in those situations.”
A longtime customer service representative with Telus said similarly.
“When I first started, we listened to customers, we appreciated them. I never had any hesitation reducing someone’s bill.”
Now, she says she’s monitored on the number of credits she issues. She says credits of a certain level have to be approved by a manager, and her scorecard is affected negatively if she lowers a customer’s bill.
Another Telus employee, a technician, said he has high sales targets to meet and he’s expected to upsell customers when he arrives at their home to install or fix equipment.
“The agents are victims of this process, as well,” said Tenumah, who has run call centres across the world. “There is a long list of metrics that are in conflict with them delivering exactly what you want.”
Asked for comment, Telus didn’t respond to the claims made by the employees.
A Rogers spokesperson said it has an intensive training program for new customer service agents, including six weeks of training and two weeks of monitoring and coaching on calls. “We’re working hard to ensure we deliver a great experience for our customers at every touchpoint and continue to invest in training, tools and technology to continuously improve,” said the spokesperson in a statement.
Spanish law limits wait times to three minutes or face fines
In late December 2025, Spain passed a law introducing mandatory customer service standards for telecoms and other large companies with more than 250 employees. It stipulates that customer calls must be answered within three minutes, 95 per cent of the time.
“This will be a revolution, in that it’s a small thing, but will change the everyday life of millions of consumers,” said Pablo Bustinduy, the Spanish consumer affairs minister.
Under the new law, which goes into effect within the next year, customer complaints must also be resolved within 15 days, or five if it involves “improper charges.” Non-compliant companies could be fined up to 100,000 euros.
Spanish Consumer Affairs Minister Pablo Bustinduy talks about the goal of Spain’s new customer service law.
A lack of competition can contribute to customers feeling helpless, Minister Bustinduy said: “Everybody does the same, so there’s no point in looking for an alternative.”
He says if companies don’t modify their practices, they’ll pay a price.
“We want to make that relation a little bit more balanced and make sure that the rights that we have as consumers are respected and enforced.”
An opportunity for telecoms to do better
Here in Canada, there is no set standard of customer service for telecoms. The CCTS investigates complaints, but the quality of customer service — all those long wait times and dropped calls — doesn’t fall under its mandate, despite hearing about it from consumers.
“It’s clear that customer frustration exists,” said Josée Bidal Thibault, commissioner and CEO of the CCTS. “There is an opportunity to do better.”
The Canadian Telecommunications Association said the majority of customers have positive experiences. The industry group represents several Canadian telecoms, including Bell and Rogers. “Telecom providers work to resolve concerns fairly and directly with customers and continue to invest in improving service for Canadians,” said spokesperson Nick Kyona.
The Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) controls the CCTS’s mandate.
A CRTC spokesperson said they’re monitoring Spain’s recent customer service legislation “to see how they may inform the CRTC’s future regulatory activities.”
Industry Minister Mélanie Joly, who oversees telecom policies, didn’t answer questions about whether her department would consider setting a standard of customer service, similar to Spain.
Her office said in a statement that recent amendments made to the Telecommunications Act make it easier for Canadians to switch, renew or cancel their telecom plans.
“When consumers have problems with their carrier, an option is to switch providers, which helps create a competitive landscape.”
Although CCTS can’t do anything to get those wait times down, Bidal Thibault encourages Canadians to turn to the ombudsman regardless.
“Customer service issues generally aren’t happening in a vacuum. Customers tend to be calling their providers when they have a problem,” she said.
“Chances are those types of problems are going to be within our mandate to help.”
