I’ve been a Rogers Iphone customer for nearly three years. Where I live, Rogers has been the only option for iPhone customers since the iPhone launched in Canada in August, 2008. In addition to being the exclusive provider, Rogers has the dubious distinction of offering the second most expensive iPhone contract in the world.

You’d think that with $3.2 billion in revenue in 2010, that they could afford to allocate resources to improve the customer experience. Instead, Rogers Canada is getting it all wrong. Two cases in point:

• Recently, Rogers text-spammed me on some silly offer. To opt out of future texts, I clicked on the link provided, only to arrive at an unsubscribe page lacking a mobile stylesheet. The text was impossible to read on my phone. I was unable to unsubscribe, and so now I’m doomed to receive more text spam. This story would be ironic, if it wasn’t idiotic.
• Yesterday, to thank me for my business, Rogers Canada e-mailed me with an offer to enter a contest to win Toronto FC tickets. Hmmm….I thought, I wonder if this includes airfare, since I live in Manitoba. Reading the fine print, I discover that the contest is open to Ontario residents only. Nice going, Rogers Canada! I replied to the offer e-mail to let them know of their faux pas. The auto-reply revealed that the mailbox is not monitored. It’s not the fact that Rogers Canada made the mistake that bothers me—although you’d think that they could have done a database query to develop a mailing list that would include Ontario residents only—what really irks me is that by choosing to ignore replies, they’re missing out on opportunities to discover such errors to prevent them from happening again. In a word: fail. Mistakes are ok. Not caring about mistakes is not ok. It’s arrogant, faceless, and evil.

I tweeted my dismay, @Rogers_Canada, as I have in the past. Promptly, I get “Sorry for the inconvenience” @replies from a very nice woman who goes by the twitter handle @RogersElise, who is apparently the only human at Rogers Canada. Since apologies for the inconvenience are all she’s able to offer, I empathize with her—an employee who is essentially the public face of a corporation with no regard for its customers. At this point though, after three “I’m sorry for the inconvenience” @replies, this is becoming patronizing.

Rogers Canada’s disregard for their customers is arrogant and pathetic. Thankfully, the evil dictatorship is about to end, as MTS enters the iPhone market at the end of March. My Rogers contract ends in August. With number portability, I’ll never look back.