The Commission for Complaints for Telecom-television Services (CCTS) on Monday published its 2021 Compliance Monitoring Report (CMR).
Every year, the CCTS publishes a report to sum up the main areas of non-compliance by its participating service providers (PSPs) across Canada.
According to its 2021 report, the CCTS received a total of 15,000 complaints against PSPs between January 1 and December 31, 2021. Out of these complaints, the organization identified approximately 2,400 alleged compliance breaches of the Procedural Code.
In 14 years, the CCTS says it has dealt with over 140,000 consumer telecom complaints.
The CCTS found a particularly considerable growth in instances of false reports from PSPs that a complaint had been resolved directly with the customer.
In addition, the CCTS noted that 2021 saw “almost double the number of compliance breaches flagged in which PSPs did not submit complete responses to complaints they had been unable to resolve with the customer (missing or insufficient documents or explanations).”
There was also “a prevalence of breaches related to the objections process for merit-based objections, which are not allowed under CCTS’ processes.”
A Canadian telecom operator becomes obligated to join the CCTS when one of its customers files a complaint with the organization. In 2021, four of the 22 service providers that were required to join the CCTS failed to do so and were therefore referred to the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission.
The CCTS did, however, note that it recorded fewer compliance breaches from PSPs “who fail to implement mutually acceptable resolutions or CCTS-issued Recommendations and Decisions.”
This year, the CCTS said it saw a higher-than-usual complaint volume in July as a result of the nationwide Rogers network outage.
