How do you combat a bad, or worse, an illegitimate, review?
We here at Worldline are relatively new to this whole “social thing,” and having spent years with our heads down, working hard at keeping our existing customers happy while acquiring new ones, there is plenty that we’ve missed online.
Plenty.
Search engines like Google and Bing or review sites like Yelp or Redflagdeals provide prime Internet real-estate for folks to rant about how bad they think a company is – all with essentially zero accountability.
When we read these, the first thing we do (now), is figure out if they are our customer, and if they are, we get in touch and fix the problem. If you go to our Facebook page, you’ll see plenty of cases where we’ve resolved an issue, and in the end we’re both happy. Problem solved.
However, there are these other “reviews” from mystery posters. People who sound like they are just making stuff up. Who are they exactly? What is their agenda? Who do they work for? Those are the questions that pop to the front of our minds – because in most cased they are talking about us in a way that doesn’t sound a lot, or even a little, like us.
They’re complaining about our overcharging them (when our prices have never been anything like what they are saying), or us forcing them into signing a contract, (which we don’t have), or us charging a cancellation fee, (which we don’t do) or my favourite, us charging too much for Cable TV (a service we don’t, as yet, have).
There have long been reports and rumours of businesses posting negative reviews of their competitors’ products or companies, but according to the LA Times, new research shows that now, more than ever, people are writing extremely negative reviews about products they never purchased.
Duncan Simester, a marketing professor at MIT, and Eric Anderson of Northwestern University did a study based on reviews posted on the website of a major private-label apparel company that generates hundreds of thousands of reviews.
The duo found that about 5% of the product reviews were written by customers with no record of actually purchasing the item. Those reviews were “significantly more negative” than the remaining reviews.
For Worldline, whose reputation is everything, this is a problem because studies show that 72% of consumers say they believe the reviews posted online. We also know that people looking for Unlimited High Speed Internet and Digital Home Phone services are searching online.
In just a few minutes a new one of these reviews, truthful or not, can hurt the excellent reputation that we have spent years developing and frankly, earning.
It’s a problem we are now confronting head on, challenging those that are, simple put, nonsense, and dealing with those who do have a legitimate point on a case by case basis.
We guess the bottom line is, when you’re online doing research, never believe everything you read.*
* except for here of course.
I’ve been a customer for quite some time now….
I think Bell has become to big for it’s britches and Rogers has was to many connection issues. Every weekend we have either Bell or Rogers trying to get us back with them. My neighbors and I now phone each other warning they are in the neighborhood. Thats pretty bad when we all have to hide out and warn others…. maybe they should look into the reasons why!.. Worldline hasn’t got any more issues than Bell or Rogers. They are by far much easier to get a hold of than Bell or Rogers. Bell being the worst Worldline has exceptional pricing esp when it comes to long distance..I don’t have to watch the clock or wait for a specific time to call family. If ever I have had an issue it was resolved within the hr or close to it. I think the reason other companies hammer insults is pretty immature.. but thats how jealousy comes out. You guys are much cheaper and just as good if not better .. esp in customer support… so don’t take any of it to heart and keep up the awesome job 🙂 and let the others sort themselves out…;)
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Awesome comment! Thanks. And I can picture in my head you guys all hunkered down hiding from those guys. Amazing!
Hello, I currently live with 3 people who use computers as well as the internet for the computers. We are with Worldline and the prices are great but for some reason whenever someone on a computer buffers a video (From what I’ve noticed.) it slows down everyone else’s internet.
I am not sure if its because of the plan we have with you guys or what, but it is getting quite annoying especially when one is playing a game online and another is watching videos on Netflix or Youtube, the one playing the game online receives a ton of lag.
Not only that but I’ve noticed this while playing a game called Counter-Strike:Global Offensive that my ping would jump randomly then lower back and it would constantly do that over and over. I checked if the others using computers were downloading or either watching videos somewhere online but none of them were, so I found that to be pretty odd.
To get to my point, I was just wondering if maybe there is a solution to this or if that’s how its supposed to be.
Thank you,
EdgeG
Hey there,
I’ll have to look into your service for you to give you the best answer. Could you send your account details, (Name, address, phone number) to info@worldline.ca and I’ll see what’s up. Okay?
Thanks, I will do that as soon as possible!
It seems these days when real time sensitive applications are run on your network some for of QoS behavior is required for smooth gaming.
Now I’m not talking about manually prioritizing some devices above others I’m actually talking about QoS with respect to how your router handles buffers and queues.
A lot of us suffer from Buffer Bloat without realizing it. Buffer bloat our internet connections usually happens on the upload we have faster LAN speeds than WAN speeds so what ends up happening is we hit maximum WAN speeds then we start buffering on the router. This problem has only gotten worse as routers gotten much larger buffers (it’s not uncommon to have 128MB of ram on a router now). Instead of the internet dropping the packet telling the uploading computer to back off since you hit your upload limit the router buffers and it takes a while before the uploading computer realizes you’re at capacity since the router is still accepting packets.
So to get around this look for a QoS option in your router then go to a site like broadband reports that now has a buffer bloat tool and start lowering the upload number until you manage to reduce your buffer bloat to an acceptable level for you.
Also if your router is OpenWRT or DDWRT you can try switching to SFQ_Codel (FQ_Codel on DDWRT) as your QoS queue handler and that should alleviate the problem with sudden ping spikes since the goal of Codel originally was to reduce latency spikes.
you say 72% of viewers beleave what they read?
i think in your case the viewers maybe right as for every good review i read there is at least 10 bad ones?
i have found over the past 10 yrs. online reviews i have scouted have been 90% accurate & for this reason will not pursue your company for our business!
Hey there George, thanks for the feedback. This Worldline Review column was posted almost 8 months ago, yet it still is read a bunch of times every single day by Canadians looking for an alternative to ISP’s like Bell or Rogers. That’s very cool because it’s proving that more and more Canadians are finally coming to the realization that they don’t have to take it anymore and are looking for alternatives – like Worldline.
That said, you can trust me on this one, we pay attention to all our reviews a lot closer that you do. Although your numbers are off, (our positive reviews far outnumber the negative ones), we actually appreciate our negative reviews.
Why? Not because we’re masochists, it’s because we learn from them. The feedback from our customers, especially the ones that are having issues, provides us with the information we need to make Worldline better, to improve our processes and as a result, provide better service to our customers.
That’s what we’re all about. Providing the best possible service we can, and we’re very proud of what we do, (and if I do say so myself, justifiably so).
There are a handful of negative reviews that stand out – some so for years – however for a bunch of those cases, their anger was caused because we cut off their service. No need to get into the “why,” but they ranted and that’s just a part of doing business.
There are a number out there however that were completely justified. Those people had legitimate service complaints because we were letting them down in some way. Here’s the thing though George; we most likely fixed what was wrong when they posted their complaint and they are still with us (our churn rate is the best in the industry), or we were unable to provide them the service they were looking for because, well, we simply couldn’t.
It’s unfortunate when that happens, but, for example 99.9% of our Internet service tickets are due to legacy infrastructure issues, meaning some folks live in places where getting broadband Internet is a dodgy prospect at best and regardless of who their provider is, their service would still be, by most standards, sub-par.
(There’s good news for those people, the federal budget just allocated billions to broadband infrastructure so those cases will become rarer and rarer in the future.)
George, Worldline is growing at an almost exponential rate, and the reason for almost half of that amazing expansion is due to our existing customers referring their friends and family to us.
Ask yourself, would you refer a friend or a family member to a service that sucks?
Those are the reviews we treasure, and rely on most.
All that said, of course no company is perfect. We still screw up from time to time. How we’re trying to be different is, we’re dedicating ourselves to be the most customer-focused ISP in the country, period.
We are on a mission and that is to be the choice for Canadians for their telecom needs not just because we have Unlimited Internet and Long Distance at a fair price; but because we are single best company in the country to work with. We want them to ask themselves, “why would I be with anyone else?”
This “why” is what we’re all about in 2014.
George, if you have any questions, please give our customer service people a shout. They’ll be happy to hook you up with the Worldline service that best fits your needs, and we’ll do our very best to be the best Internet and home phone service provider you’ve ever had.
I find a lot of times ISP’s that are not Bell and Rogers seem to get negative reviews for things that are well out of their own control mostly for things caused by Bell and Rogers.
Most people I see horrible reviews for things like the Rogers or Bell installer didn’t arrive on the specified day or they apparently came a day late didn’t come in the time window quoted.
I think this is honestly very unfair to indie ISP’s as long as the indie ISP works hard to resolve the issue and reimburses the customer for the days without service they indie ISP should be given a pass on these things Bell and Rogers are infamous for providing poor install experience wherever they can to anyone that is not a Bell or Rogers customer directly.
Beyond that if it’s a global outage and the indie ISP has filed a ticked with Rogers / Bell unfortunately the customer had to be a bit understanding that if Rogers and Bell want to drag their feet really the indie ISP can’t do anything on their end unless the CRTC provides some from of fine system for our incumbents that on purpose don’t act on tickets from third parties in a timely fashion.
On the other hand if say you get billed incorrectly, are unable to contact customer support, have your modem break and can’t get warranty from your indie ISP, have the ISP’s DNS go down, or encounter routing issues after you leave the incumbent network (trace route). These are issues that you can blame your indie ISP for but honestly most indie ISP’s do these things extremely well.
The reality is the most difficult thing about switching to an Indie ISP these days is waiting for that Rogers / Bell installer and subsequent issues dealing with them.