Transfer of Responsibility & Upgrade

[Cinna]

I have had my phone and plan for 4 years; it was under my mother's name. My phone broke; I decided to transfer ownership to myself and then buy a new phone.

What I was not told (despite disclosing this to the agents helping me that I intended to buy a new phone after) was that I am locked out of buying a new phone for a month.

It's absolutely ridiculous that there is, at minimum, no transparency or even understanding regarding policy. If I had been told this upfront it would have saved me 6 hours of back-and-forth between the call centre agents as they tried to figure out why I could not buy a new phone in person.

An absolute waste of my time and now I am switching carriers as this glaring display of incompetence from multiple employees has tainted the well.

***Added Labels***

[RogersMaude]

Good day @Cinna,

Welcome to the Rogers Community and thank you for your post!

I can understand that learning about the policy preventing you to upgrade your device, right after a transfer of responsibility, can be frustrating. Is your current device defective?

We implemented this as a fraud prevention measure and apologize for the inconveniences this may cause you. 

We truly appreciate your business and do not want to see you switch service provider.  If you still need help, kindly send a private message @CommunityHelps so we can take a look into this. For more information on our messaging system, please read this blog.

Thank you!

RogersMaude

[JKazimer]

Yes, the idea of a “Transfer of Responsibility” with Rogers is misleading. It’s definitely not like Telus, where you can transfer ownership of your TELUS mobile phone number to another person without the headaches of penalties or cancellation fees.

It seems that when you transfer ownership with Telus, the incoming account owner assumes responsibility for the remaining contractual and financial obligations of the transferred account. We were with Telus, but last year we switched our family mobile phone and home internet over to Rogers. Recently, we tried to transfer our son’s phone from our name into his, thinking it would be quick and easy—just transfer the responsibility and billing to him along with his banking information. However, Rogers wants us to pay off the remaining 16 months of the phone and then charge him a fee to take over the account. So, it would cost us about $1,000 for Rogers to switch the phone from our name to his. I have a 16-year-old daughter, and to avoid getting caught in a similar situation when we need to do this for her, we plan to return to Telus once our current contract runs out.

[Pauly]

Don't blame Rogers, blame the Fraudsters who ruined it for everyone. 

[Pauly]

While I hate this policy, I can understand why its needed.  If your line is under your parents name and the phone broke and you needed a new one, you CAN buy the phone outright,  if you can not afford this, then you should wait until you have sufficient credit to open a cell phone line under your own name

[Cinna]

The policy itself is not the issue here. It's the fact that the call center agents did not convey this information to me and consequently I spent hours back-and-forth trying to figure out with various agents what was happening, during which I was told it was a "system error" and that I'd have to wait 3 days. It took another two phone calls to finally receive the correct answer.

If the agents were trained in policy adequately this would have saved us all so much time, but what's done is done now.

[Pauly]

Did you tell them you Wantred to do a device upgrade within 1 month of a TOS?  the policy is huge, what makes you think they will tell you that one specific part? how are they going to know? what about the 99 other parts they are not going to tell you?  theyre not going to be on the phone for 2 hours telling you the policy.

[Cinna]

If you read my post, I made that clear from the beginning.

"What I was not told (despite disclosing this to the agents helping me that I intended to buy a new phone after)..."

It should not take hours of conversation with support to determine the issue. So yes, I do expect them to be educated on policies that are relevant to issues that I specifically disclosed to begin with.