Well, things are starting to turn sour with Telus. Quickly.

Today was meant to be our install date for the new phone system. And… We don’t even have the lease signed. I can’t count the number of times I’ve heard “oh, that’s with [John] in [Business Solutions]” or something similar.

As a customer I don’t give a rat’s whiskers who’s responsibility it is, just get me my product!

Here is the status of the 5 major deals we are working on, worth about 1.5M$:

Phones: Missed the install date, haven’t even signed a lease because they seem completely unable to get us an accurate Equipment Schedule.

Rollover Lease: I’ve been waiting 6 months for accurate figures for each machine class. 2 weeks ago I met with the Tech Roll guy and he hadn’t been informed that Business Solutions had decided to change the vendor, so the specific prices he’d brought were in fact general prices.

T1: Still trying to get this cancelled. After 10 MONTHS of trying to get it cancelled.

Business System Development: They are really not understanding our needs. I’ve got a series of meetings for the rest of the day with Telus, and the only reason I haven’t cancelled it is because user feedback will be a big part of that, and I never turn down an opportunity for user feedback. This project is about to be dumped (with Telus anyways).

Managed Services: We’d asked Telus to look at taking over all our servers. That was 2 months ago. I spent 3 days in meetings with them, asked for final pricing by the end of the month. I haven’t heard a wink back. Consider this dumped as well.

All in all I am singularly unimpressed. My daily phone calls often go unanswered or if they are answered they are answered with platitudes. Something I’m quickly growing tired of.

So, I spent half an hour this morning with the President of Sales & Marketing chewing him and his team out. Completely unimpressed. The gist was that if I didn’t have a finished lease in my hands by the end of the day, and if these things weren’t sorted in 2 weeks I would drop Telus for everything.

I’m not normally one to be so brash, and I do realise that this means I’ll need to source other suppliers for everything, but I can’t imagine getting worse service.

My confidence really is decreasing on a daily basis in spite of all of my efforts to get things rolling again.

Oh, yeah, it’s really cold in this room too.