No Vivo figure in this one. Banco Carrefour 5 million a month is the only customer number.
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 of it.
It wasn’t. Since then the CRTC has handed every wireless and internet provider in Canada a to-do list with dates on it, and a lot of the mid-market operators I hear from are heading into Q4 budget season with a CCM shortlist in one hand and that list in the other. So this is the piece I wish those two ops leads had read before they signed.
Three questions. Nobody puts them in the RFP.
One. Can it send the CRTC notices the way the CRTC wrote them?
Here’s what changed. On April 13, 2026 the CRTC issued Telecom Regulatory Policy 2026-67, and it takes effect April 13, 2027. Every provider has to send a notice 90 days before a contract ends, and a separate one 90 days before any promotion longer than three months runs out. The contract notice has to include the expiry date, a line saying the customer can switch or cancel without penalty, a link to the plans available to them (including bring-your-own-device and financing options), what happens on auto-renewal, and where the self-service tools live. It goes out in whatever channel the customer picked. Email, text, phone, mail. And you keep a copy of every single one, because the CCTS will ask for it when a complaint lands.
Then on April 24 the CRTC issued 2026-78, effective April 26, 2027. Customers get to change or cancel their plan without talking to a human, and every self-service action gets a written confirmation with a stated turnaround.
Read that again as a communications problem, because that’s what it is. A personalized, multichannel, dated, audited message to every customer approaching a contract or promo expiry, plus a confirmation for every plan change. That’s an orchestration job with a compliance trail, and a PDF template doesn’t come close. Until enforcement day, providers also owe the CRTC quarterly progress reports, so somebody has to show their work.
So ask the vendor to demo it. Not describe it. Show me the 90-day notice for a customer on a $55 promo with a financed phone, in SMS, with the plan list live, and then show me the stored copy. If the answer starts with “our professional services team can build that,” you’ve learned what you needed to know.
Two. Will it catch the wrong charge before the bill goes out?
The CCTS published its annual report on January 14, 2026. Record year: 23,647 complaints, up 17 percent, and billing was 46 percent of all issues, the highest in five years. Incorrect charges and missing credits led the billing category. The mid-year report on April 29 was worse. Incorrect charges up 66 percent against the same point a year earlier.
And it isn’t only the big three. Rogers, Telus, Bell, Fido and Koodo take 79 percent of the complaints, sure. But the CRTC’s 2026 market report says new and regional competitors took over 55 percent of the mobile subscribers added in 2024. Quebecor alone added 53,200 mobile lines in its second quarter this year, and its ARPU went up 2.5 percent at the same time. Growth like that is a billing stress test. Every new plan, every bundle, every migration is a chance to put the wrong number in front of a customer who’s already primed to complain about it.
Most CCM platforms are very good at making a wrong number look beautiful. They render it, personalize it, and push it to five channels. They don’t check it. That’s a different job, and in my experience nobody asks about it in the RFP because the billing system is “somebody else’s.”
Banco Carrefour validates 100 percent of its invoice data with hiperValidation before a single statement goes out, and sends 5 million personalized messages a month through hiperCCM. Zero errors in customer communications
I’m biased, obviously. But the question stands whichever vendor you’re talking to: does the platform check the data, or just format it? And if it doesn’t, what does?
Three. When the rules change again, how fast can we change the message, and what will it cost?
They will change again. On June 12, 2026 the fee ban from CRTC 2026-43 came into force, and by August 14 the CRTC had rejected Bell, Rogers and Telus’ attempt to stall the probe into the $40 setup, $25 shipping and $15 SIM charges that replaced the banned ones. On June 12 the CRTC also opened consultation 2026-134 to fold all four consumer codes into one, with a public hearing in Gatineau on November 30. Whatever comes out of that lands on top of the April 2027 deadlines.
So in the twelve months after you sign, count on at least three rounds of rewrites to customer-facing messages. Who does them? A product manager in your office, on a Tuesday afternoon? Or a change request to the vendor with a two-week queue and an invoice?
Quadient, to its credit, published a list of RFP questions for its own category, and half of them are about billing multipliers: per channel, per edit, per preview, per new feature. Their line was that if a vendor’s existing customers routinely blow past their budgets, you will too. I think that’s the most honest thing a CCM vendor has said in public. Ask for the multiplier table. Ask how many change requests the average customer files a year and what the average one costs. Then ask what the same rewrite costs if your own team does it.
That’s the “using a third of it” problem from the other side. The two ops leads I talked to had decent platforms. They stopped using most of the features because every change needed a ticket, and after a year people quit filing tickets.
What I’d do with the shortlist
Put the three questions at the top of the RFP, above the feature matrix. Make each vendor demo the 2026-67 contract notice, live, on your data. Ask where validation happens and who owns it. Get the pricing multipliers in writing. Then score the demos, not the decks.
Q4 is when these contracts get signed and April 2027 is when they get tested. Maybe the platform you’re leaning toward passes all three. That’d be great. But I’d rather know in October than find out in a CCTS complaint file next spring.
If you want to see how a bill can carry a CRTC notice, a personalized offer and a validated number in the same message, Request a Demo
Fast Movn is a Canadian technology company based in Vancouver, BC. Our platform pairs hiperValidation, which checks 100 percent of billing data before it reaches the customer, with hiperCCM, which turns the bill into a personalized, multichannel conversation. We work with telecom and financial services companies across Brazil and North America.
Sources
- CRTC, Telecom Regulatory Policy CRTC 2026-67, Enhancing customer notifications, April 13, 2026. https://crtc.gc.ca/eng/archive/2026/2026-67.htm
- CRTC, Telecom Regulatory Policy CRTC 2026-78, Enhancing self-service mechanisms, April 24, 2026. https://crtc.gc.ca/eng/archive/2026/2026-78.htm
- CRTC, Telecom Regulatory Policy CRTC 2026-43, March 12, 2026 (fee ban in force June 12, 2026). https://crtc.gc.ca/eng/archive/2026/2026-43.htm
- CRTC, Broadcasting and Telecom Notice of Consultation CRTC 2026-134, Harmonizing the consumer protection codes, June 12, 2026. https://crtc.gc.ca/eng/archive/2026/2026-134.htm
- iPhone in Canada, “CRTC Rejects Bell, Rogers, Telus Attempt to Stall Switching Fee Probe,” August 16, 2026. https://www.iphoneincanada.ca/2026/08/16/crtc-rejects-bell-rogers-telus-attempt-to-stall-switching-fee-probe/
- CCTS, “Telecom and TV Complaints Continue to Rise Across Canada: CCTS Annual Report,” January 14, 2026. https://www.ccts-cprst.ca/telecom-and-tv-complaints-continue-to-rise-across-canada-ccts-annual-report/
- CCTS, “Behind the numbers: Billing concerns continue to drive rising telecom and TV complaints,” mid-year report, April 29, 2026. https://www.ccts-cprst.ca/behind-the-numbers-billing-concerns-continue-to-drive-rising-telecom-and-tv-complaints/
- CRTC, Canadian Telecommunications Market Report 2026. https://crtc.gc.ca/eng/publications/reports/PolicyMonitoring/2026/ctmr.htm
- iPhone in Canada, “Freedom Mobile and Fizz Fuel Big Subscriber Growth for Quebecor,” August 6, 2026. https://www.iphoneincanada.ca/2026/08/06/freedom-mobile-and-fizz-fuel-big-subscriber-growth-for-quebecor/
- Quadient, “12 RFP Tips Before Signing Your SaaS CCM Contract,” June 28, 2022. https://www.quadient.com/en/blog/12-rfp-answers-you-need-signing-your-saas-ccm-contract
- Banco Carrefour and hiperstream case study (Fast Movn). 100 percent of invoice data validated, 5 million personalized communications per month.