cancel
Showing results for 
Show  only  | Search instead for 
Did you mean: 

What compensation for email outage will keep you as a Telus customer?

SunDog
Organizer

Having an email outage of more than a few hours is simply inexcusable in this day and age. While I appear to be getting new emails, I know for a fact that there are emails from at least August 16th and 17th that have not arrived. And the biggest problem with not getting emails is that you don't know you didn't get them unless the sender tells you (which they can't do via email!) or they eventually show up.

 

I have internet, Optik tv, home phone, and three mobility accounts with Telus. I will be moving in the next couple of months or I would do it today but Telus will be losing out on close to $500 per month of revenue from just me. How many others will there be? Don't forget, this exact thing happened back in May and they appear to have done nothing to address the root of the problem.

 

So here is my honest answer to my question: I would only be satisfied with a minimum of 2 months credit for my internet service which is $85 x 2 = $170.

 

What about you?

46 REPLIES 46


@Chicnstu wrote:

I would love to find out how many customers demanding compensation for their email disruption actually pay for the email as a standalone service and don't just receive it as the complimentary feature/addon that it is. The vocal majority of people who are demanding compensation seem to be those who run a business from home but do not pay for business products and the guarantees for service restoral and lost revenue those provide. Telus webmail is a free addon of residential internet. There was no loss in internet service.

 

I feel for the people who have been impacted by this outage and yes, the response and fix from Telus was sub-par for sure. That being said, demanding compensations with threats to cancel all services is definitely overreacting in my book.


Internet service includes e-mail service. It is part of the internet service that we pay for. Would you pay full price for a half service...I don't think so.

It is offered but not on the list of ISP services I need or use, so it is truly a non-issue.

Spinner
Helpful Neighbour

What the heck are you talking about?

 

Telus.net email accounts sold as part of the Internet service, not some freebie add-on you incorrectly describe. This is no different than if the Telus DSL modem fails or if the fiber optic cable is cut.

Please remember to be polite to the phone agent on the other end if you are discussing compensation for this outage. I worked in a call centre many years ago and I remember when we would have big outages that impacted customers like this. If you call in and are nice and polite, most agents will be very willing to work with you and will offer compensation as much as they are allowed to at their level. If you feel it's not enough, ask to speak to an escalations manager. If you come in guns blazing with threats of cancellations and yell at the agent just because they are "the voice of Telus", it's very easy to immediately stop caring to help you and do the bare minimum to get them off the phone. The people on the other end are humans too. 

Who are these people that think I have to be loyal and nice to Telus? Where is Telus loyalty to me? They give stuff to new customers, what about existing ones? Nada. I have been a customer for 30 years. I pay them CASH every month. They charge a lot for there services, so yes I expect them to work. They constantly harass me by calling all the time. When they change plans they never switch me to the best deal, I have to find out there is a better package and change myself. I owe Telus the same as the give me which is nothing.

Do you have a hostile relationship with everyone whom you do business with?  I admit their phone salespeople are most often supremely annoying jerks.  Just talked to one the other day.  He was a persistent idiot. 

And there are other things about Telus which tick me off. However, they do have a robust and dependable network.  

 

Try to bear in mind that it was probably one person whose mistake caused this outage, and the rest of them are working hard to bring it back.

 

 


@BillTelusCust wrote:

 

Try to bear in mind that it was probably one person whose mistake caused this outage, and the rest of them are working hard to bring it back.

 

 


And who’s fault was it to subcontract the work in the first place?  

Its not a complimentary feature, its part of the package.  When they sell you internet service the price of the email is factored in.  Telus (or any other company for that matter) is not going to give you something for free.  If you offer a service then stand behind it and make it work in a timely manner.  One would thing that there should be a backup system in place that they should have been able to switch over to, until they fixed the original problem.  In the past email was considered best effort service, but in today's world that is no longer the case.  Times have changed and so should how the service gets implemented.  

NFtoBC
Community Power User
Community Power User
In this instance, it appears a ‘backup’ would have required a complete, redundant system, run in parallel. An unlikely backup scenario.
NFtoBC
If you find a post useful, please give the author a "Kudo"

That's right and this is why I use an email service which has exactly this type of scenario.  If the data center were knocked out of commission completely, it would be up in another data center in 20 minutes.  It isn't just backed up, it is replicated.

 

 

Spinner
Helpful Neighbour

Asked for and received 2 months of compensation.

 

If and when this is resolved, I will ask for a month of free service for every day the email service has been down.


@Spinner wrote:

Asked for and received 2 months of compensation.

 

If and when this is resolved, I will ask for a month of free service for every day the email service has been down.


If this is true, it makes me think Telus is hoping we'll all pull a "Kramer" and accept free coffee for a year.

 

I'm still waiting for emails that I know for a fact were sent on August 16th and 17th and I have only just in the last couple of hours gotten the one from the 16th. It's the ones I don't know about that concern me.

Spinner
Helpful Neighbour
I received a text message yesterday.

“Message From TELUS: We are very sorry you are still unable to access your TELUS email. Effective immediately, we are going to help make this right by giving you one month of Internet service for free, that will be automatically applied on your upcoming bill. Depending on your bill date, the free month may appear on your next bill. Visit https://telus.com/emailoutage for more information.”

TELUS is already offering 1 month free service. Asking for 2 or more months free service is completely valid. If you accept 1 month, that’s like buying a car at MSRP.

At this point, email has been down for an entire 7 days. When you talk with a Telus rep, use an example they would understand. For example, some people use email to receive notice of auxiliary/on-call work. Can you imagine how they’ve been negatively impacted?

A week now with no email. What other internet providers, other than shaw are there? Unlimited internet on higher packages would keep me, and it would cost telus almost nothing.

mmbwest
Just Moved In

Depends how much longer before full service is restored. Each day it isn't, my price goes up.g

 

I just got an offer of a $10 refund with some other offers as a bonus (none of which I want). So I've seen $20 offers and various months for free offers. What is the deal here? $10 is just embarrassing. I have had various problems with Telus over the years which makes me wonder at their competency as an internet provider. The email problem is something which never should have happened and to offer your customers a pittance as compensation makes me think their management is totally incompetent. Time to look at other options. I would be curious to see how much business Telus loses over this debacle.

I see that Shaw has been taking full advantage of this.

keenerboy
Friendly Neighbour

Further to the threads regarding this topic I think the offer of $10.00 off your next bill plus some free movies is pretty lame.

Perhaps for the average user just emailing friends etc this might suffice. But for a lot of customers like myself running a home based business an email outage can have significant implications. I'm still not sure what has been lost or if any of my customers have emailed me and I haven't received the email.

The only way to know is for me to be proactive and email clients to notify them I may not have received their email.  I have Telus internet, cel and TV costing about $280 per month. Due the math with 13 plus  million subscribers and annual revenue of 14 billion plus some of the highest cel phone TV and internet costs in the world a $10.00 offer falls who fully short. 

The large tel coms in Canada have a monopoly in this country mainly from regulations from the CRTC. Its time for change.

My feeling on this is one moth totally free services for TV and internet if offered would install some confidence in Telus that they do the right thing for their customers. If I have to call, complain and ask for that that wouldn't instill my confidence back as my ISP. 

 

I agree that the offer of $10 off your next bill isn't meaningful compensation, especially considering this is the second time in 3 months customers are inconvenienced by an extended outage. I feel for business customers. I also find it troubling that some people are apparently being compensated differently than others - $10, $20, a month of free service? I don't think it's unreasonable to offer business customers a bit more compensation, but give all business customers the same credit, and give all residential customers the same credit. To do otherwise is not a good policy. 

Lorileeh11
Just Moved In

I totally agree 2 months of free internet $85 x 2=$170.00

BillTelusCust
Rockstar

As an internet provider, I expect them to provide robust connectivity to the internet.  I expect proper service and to have the speeds as advertised.

 

Although I agree that the email outage is really quite outrageous, in my world, I don't use an ISP as an email provider and have not done so for decades.

 

In answer to your question, if something like this happened to their internet connectivity, that would be it - but the email outage would be a non issue. I do feel for those affected, but it is quite simply not a consideration as far as I'm concerned.  The only Telus internet I'm associated with, although business DSL, is pretty robust and steady.  The problems have been very minimal over the years.