Customer service experience | Reviews | Consumer forum

I hadn't used my cell phone for about 2-3 months and when I turned it on, I found that I couldn't make inbound or outbound calls anymore. I'd been using this phone and service for 5 years already.

Trying to make outbound calls resulting in this message:
"We're sorry. Your home cellular company has not authorized us to provide service. Please contact your home cellular company for further information." Then it repeated the message in French and ended with "25".

If I tried to call my cell phone from another line, I got the message "The customer you are calling is unavailable at the moment. Please try again later."

I was, however, able to dial 611 and *777# (which told me that I had over $20 of credit and the account didn't expire until August 2012), but not any proper phone number or even *777.

It took about 5 days to clear up the problem and get my phone working again. I had a few unpleasant experiences with customer service, such as waiting on hold for 40 minutes (after being told that the wait was less than 3 minutes), having the customer service person presumably hit the wrong button, kicking me back to the main menu and the end of the wait queue again, and dealing with a few customer service reps who had no idea what the issue was and tried to fit the problem into one of the cookie cutter issues. As sad as it is to say, this might be better than what I've experienced elsewhere.

Eventually, I got to speak to Karen, who I think is one of the supervisors. She was on top of things, liaised with the tech team, tried out a few solutions, and called back when she said she would. I still don't quite know the full story on what the problem was, but something on the network on their end got out of whack and is now fixed