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[Home Phone] Home Phone ported without consent- need some help

So...

Lost home phone service with Rogers September 6th- contacted Rogers September 7th, they indicated Bell Mobility had the line, which is funny because we in no way contacted Bell. Rep advises on monday he will put in order to move, tuesday a tech out. Rep is surprised as he indicated that this couldnt have happened without an account number, but firmly believes in Bell error, advises to not contact Bell, it could only makes things worse.

September 9th rolls around - turns out order to move back cant be done, he needs the account number, yet we dont have one- he advises to call bell- called bell, played coy and was just "looking to see how my order was" - after a lot of searching on their end, using phone number, address, name etc etc- they did not find any order.
went to call Rogers back, system issues, so still no phone.

September 10th- i add VM and call id to low use cell, however while we now have to use cell instead of home phone, the package we have is no longer available. The rep contacts my fiancee and the rep says we need to call Bell's porting office to make up an account number so that he can move it back....

Obviously very frustrated at the situation- no home phone for over 48 business hours ( not including weekend) and its some how on us to fix it.

Who do i contact to get this fixed?

Re: [Home Phone] Home Phone ported without consent- need some he

I had a similar situation happen to me. Mine involved Charter and Verizon. Charter said Verizon had the number, Verizon said Charter had the number. Neither one of them would call the other to figure it out. I could have just gotten a new number but I wanted my old one back. What I did was file a complaint with my state Department of Public Utilities. I then got a call from a very nice Charter rep that apparently knew exactly what to do and had the issue resolved within 24 hours.

I would imagine you have a similar government department where you are. Give them a call...

This will be Rogers responsibility to get your number back. You need to contact the Office of the President. You do that by:
Calling 1.888.ROGERS.1
Ask CSR for a Customer Service Specialist (or ask for Retentions)
Ask CSS for their Supervisor
Ask Supervisor for Office of the President.

You'll need to go in that order, and you'll likely have to explain your issue to each representative. They need to be the ones porting it back in, since they ported it out. They have your account information already. Rogers will need to contact the people they ported out the number to, and ask for it back. It shouldn't be complex on their end.

FWIW (I am in the US, but I am guessing that porting in Canada works in a very similar fashion as it does here), I have seem similar happen. Evidently there are some loopholes in the security of the porting process:

Several years ago, we were porting in several numbers for a new customer. We submitted all of the necessary paperwork to our CLEC (with that customer's LOA, bill copy, etc.) Everything went along as usual. Immediately after the port, we were testing all of the ported numbers, and found that one of them did not port (even though it was on our original port request.) I did some digging and discovered that a similar number (one digit off from the number that SHOULD have ported and didn't) had been ported to us! Said number most certainly did NOT belong to our customer!

We had no idea who's number had ported, but someone's had. I did a CNAM dip on it and it appeared to be someone's residential line, but searching on-line didn't render any way of contacting the person to let them know what had happened. We ended up just letting it sit in our account and didn't use it. It ported out about a week or so later. (Most likely when someone discovered their home phone was broken, and AT&T ported it back.)

My guess is that someone at our CLEC fat-fingered the number when they were entering it into a portal somewhere. However, it's odd that the losing carrier didn't call shenanigans on the port when all of our paperwork obviously did NOT match the information on that number's account.

Similar thing could have probably happened to you. Someone with a number close to yours may have been porting to Bell, and somebody fat-fingered the number when entering the port request. And now you have this mess.

In the US, the "old" provider cannot port a number *to* the "new" provider. The "new" provider must port the number *from* the "old" provider. If it works in a similar fashion there, then I find it hard that Rogers would have ported your number to Bell... instead, Bell ported your number from Rogers. Since you have no business relationship with Bell (no account with them) it's going to be hard for you to call up and have Bell fix it. Rogers would need to handle porting it back from Bell (and the two companies' porting departments should talk to each other and work out the logistics of making this happen.) At no point should you have to be the one making it all happen (although "should" and reality may end up being two different things.)

Problem is, this is such a rare thing to happen, most people at Rogers (or any phone company), especially on the front lines, are going to have no idea what you are talking about. Working your way up the chain until you get someone with a clue is a must.

^^

Yep, ports can only be initiated by the "new service provider". Also the no account number is required for landline to landline ports. Only the customers name as it appears on their invoice and their address is required. The system is also pretty much automated as well so as long as the information submitted is correct, the port will go through even if it's unauthorized.

I don't know if the number was ported to a Bell landline or Bell cell phone, but if it was a landline there is no account number required to initiate a port back, just the account holder's name and address. Since Bell is an ILEC, they must submit all of their customer's name and addresses into a portal for all CLECs to access for porting purposes. This portal is accessible to pretty much any Rogers employee who handles home phone accounts.

Thanks for the info. So got a little farther and they escalated it to an "off line group" will wait for friday and see if they have an answer.

What if i had an emergency with no phone? i happen to have a cell, not everyone does...

You can also use twitter on this fight, @RogersHelps is Rogers social media feed, but they're usually very helpful. They might be able to get connected to the right people more quickly.

Basically say something like this: My Rogers Home Phone was ported to another provider WITHOUT MY PERMISSION! Please help me!!

Re: [Home Phone] Home Phone ported without consent- need some he

so on wednesday called the cancellation line, and explained the issue, what i didnt do was push for a supervisor, and the office of the president- that will bite me as you will see in a minute.

So they get a ticket going [one had previously not been created as the guy who initially tried to help was good at calling back, bad at given any helpful advice], they credit me some wireless minutes as we wait for the "off line" group to do their work on the ticket.
They will call in 48 hours.

Friday roles around- no call- nothing.

I call them [from work], re-explain the situation - they apologize, and as i am a pretty busy individual i tell them they can look into why the group still has the ticket open, apparently hasnt done anything [they advised it was still being worked on...] and why no one called me back, and then they can call me back today and leave a message to tell me what is going on, and they agreed to do so. I also advised on the asinine idea of me calling of bell mobility and creating a fake account to port it back over- they huffed at that one and said it was a loyalty rep who had advised that, but it should be this group that fixes it.

Get home from work, 10:30 at night and no call. Nothing. Again.

So tomorrow they are really not going to like me, and i will do as mentioned above and ensure i reach that office of the president (understanding they may not be open on the weekend but they are likely going to have a voicemail)

I havent even started thinking about what rogers can do to retain my business once this is fixed at this point- what is reasonable for an unreasonable situation?

quick update:

called asked for a supervisor today- she is going to look into things and call me back.
Fun interaction of the day with Rogers?
First cancel rep prior to getting the Supervisor:
After politely, yet sternly saying i need to speak with a supervisor, giving a high level overview of the situation, then asking for the supervisor, they proceeded to try to tell me that it cant just be ported over, rogers would never do this- why oh why would he argue that with me- to what end i ask??

Fun interaction #2:
After asking the supervisor to call me back, she said how you dont have a home phone, then laughed- then realized what she did and apologized for the bad joke-- i absolutely can not believe the culture of customer care with Rogers

its not about them porting it out- its about the cluster**** service thats been over a week of them not fixing it

Does the old calling the 855 York Mills switchboard and asking for the Office of the President trick not work anymore?

never heard of that one. 1.5 hours to go before that supervisor hasnt called me back either...

Why can't they just give you a temporary phone number, until your original phone comes back from Bell? This way at least you have the phone to place calls. Or am I missing something?

Wow... total cluster. We've had situations where a carrier has released a number in the NPAC to us when we never requested it. We let the SV expire, assuming it was a fat-finger error.

There are supposed to be inter-carrier fallout procedures in place to get these sorts of errors fixed within hours, if they're followed properly.

It sounds like you're caught inside the vortex of Rogers not knowing what to do. It just needs to get to the right person and it'd be fixed pronto.
--
MNSi Internet - »www.mnsi.net

wow. So.. called back and spoke with another supervisor and finally got it pushed up to the office of the president. The thing is, it seems lost on why- and when i say pushed i really had to push.

My final speech to finally get the OotP [which btw i almost let him talk me into simply coaching the previous reps etc]:

I want to trust you, but i cant. Over the last week i have had a rep tell me to fake an account at bell, 2 reps tell me they would call me back and didnt. I had a supervisor tell me they would call back and didnt, with that same supervisor making a joke about the lack of a phone. You can blame the other 4 people for the lack of trust. If you feel that you [that sup.] are the last stop, that line in the sand, fantastic, but if you feel the [aforementioned] customer experience warrants moving this forward then thats what i need you to do.

I think the most frustrating part was the proactive offer of $50 for the trouble- i let him know that i was no where close to even caring about that yet, and im obviously looking at canceling my services.

The other piece was that ZERO interm-solutions have been offered- no temp number, no person saying you should change to a certain cell plan-NOTHING. It should not be the customer to provide these, but it is oh so frustrating.

Not even sure if escalating it to office of the president would help. Something like this requires someone who has intricate knowledge of porting processes, essentially someone who deals with this on a daily basis for a living. Hopefully they'll be able to figure out who that person is and forward off your case to them.

yeah at this point, im not sure if im more frustrated at no home phone for over a week, or the way this has been handled. The supervisor let me know Office of the President doesnt help with tech stuff, which is fine, i assume the ticket is in the right place now- what i want from the Office of the President is a person who is going to own this custer****

Out of curiosity, what happens when you call your home phone number with your cell phone?

it says number not in service

If you already haven't, I think its time you filed a report with the CCTS concerning the "slamming" of your phone number. The website is: »www.ccts-cprst.ca/complaints/complaint-form .

Sounds a lot like someone accidentally mistyped your number so it got ported to Bell by mistake and then never activated on an account. My bet is someone who has a number similar to yours is also having a headache being told their number was ported and yet, it wasn't.

If you'd like to send me your number in a PM, I can let you know exactly which carrier it's with (Rogers, Bell landline, or Bell Mobility) so you can at least have some correct facts.
--
I represent AcroVoice, a full service Canadian VoIP Provider.
Buy your Obihai ATA shipped from within Canada.

I wonder if he sent you his latest Rogers Bill if you could somehow port that number over to your service. Would be interesting.

What a mess though.

As you said, someone probably hasn't had their line ported properly, and they are wondering why.

Sunday update:

call from rogers- amazing that they even did that- so i called back and the rep said the back office couldnt get it done- they need an account number, i need to talk with Bell.
WTF.
i simply said thanks for the info and we ended the call. I was too mad to think or ask questions.
So i went to the Bell store, because what other choice do i have- of course hey didnt have anything, HOWEVER they did give me a lot of great info on their plans, so thank Rogers for continuously pushing me over to your competition...

I called back, more level headed- new rep now advised the back office actually no longer sees the number with anyone- and its just sitting in limbo. So this is good news, and he submitted another ticket over to get it back from limbo. Did that mean i actually didnt need to drive over to the mall and go to a Bell store today? Does that mean if i didnt call back today that ticket would have been delayed by who knows how many days? Probably.

I have also filed a compliant with the CCTS. Thank you to YSO for the link.

At this point i am now waiting for:
1) Call from the OotP
2) Call from back office and hopefully fixing my service
3) Info from CCTS.

Still no home phone.