Telecom Customer Experience: Customer communications during the next outage. What telcos and utilities should rehearse before winter hits. On July 13, 2026, a fibre cut in Oakville took Cogeco down across Ontario for about three hours. Stores in Cornwall went cash only. And the line that stuck with me came from Cogeco itself. Its outage…
Billing Accuracy: Why I joined a Brazilian software company to run their North American expansion. I met Almir Carrion at a track meet. Not at a conference. Not through a warm intro from somebody’s fund. Our sons were friends, and we were two dads standing on the side of a track in Victoria watching them…
Canada is buying CCM. Mexico is still waiting on its regulator. Brazil built billing validation instead. I ran a software company in Victoria for 26 years, and I lost more than one deal to a sentence I still hear every month: nobody ever got fired for buying the big name. I get it. When the…
The three questions telcos forget to ask their CCM provider Back in July I talked to two telco ops leads in the same month. Same story both times. Big platforms. Big price tags. They were using maybe a third of what they’d bought. I wrote about it then, and I figured that was the end…
On August 24 the Real-Time Rail By-law and the RTR Rules came into force. Payments Canada announced the approvals on June 30 and set the launch for Q4 2026. I’ve had maybe a dozen conversations about the RTR since spring, and almost nobody I talked to had the date right. A few still think it’s…
Critical Customer: Hyperpersonalization isn’t a marketing buzzword. It’s a billing problem. Banco Carrefour sends five million personalized messages a month to its customers in Brazil. And here’s the detail I always lead with when this comes up: those messages don’t come from the marketing stack. They come out of the billing platform. Sit with that…
Open Finance is changing who owns the customer relationship in Canada. CCM is the battleground most banks haven’t named yet. On June 27, the draft Consumer-Driven Banking Regulations landed in the Canada Gazette. Part I, Volume 160, Number 26. The comment window closes August 26. Almost nobody outside a compliance team read it. I get…
Canada’s banned activation and cancellation fees on June 12. Retention just became a communications problem. On June 12, a rule that had been coming for months finally landed. Under CRTC policy 2026-43, Canadian carriers can no longer charge you to activate a plan, change a plan, or cancel one, unless there’s a subsidized device involved.…
Why mid-market telcos keep buying enterprise CCM platforms they’ll never fully use Twice in the last month, I’ve had the same conversation with telecom ops leads. Different companies, different provinces, almost word for word the same story. They bought a big-name customer communications platform a few years back. It cost a fortune. And they figure…
Canada’s billing complaints jumped 61%. The fix is upstream from your call centre. At the end of April, the CCTS released its mid-year numbers, and they were rough. Complaints about telecom and TV service in Canada climbed 61% in six months, to more than 19,000. Billing was the number one thing people complained about, the…
