Can a Business Offset Their Bad Treatment of Customers with Philanthropy?
"Bell Let’s Talk" is an annual charitable program with the goal of raising awareness about mental health and ending the stigma surrounding the topic. Bell Let's Talk Day started on January 28th 2011, when Bell Canada made their initial pledge of $50 million dollars towards mental health.
Such a cause had never been the focus of a corporate campaign; Bell was the first company to publicly acknowledge mental health in this way. Their goal was to "end the stigma" surrounding mental health; as this is often cited as the major reason Canadians do not seek mental health services.
Bell received a lot of praise for starting such an initiative, but also a lot of scrutiny. The campaign seemed like a distraction from Bell's internal issues, or to put it plainly: Mental Health Capitalism. This is when a company uses the topic of mental health as a marketing device. Ironically, in these situations, the campaign usually reflects the exact opposite of the company's culture or values.
How to Spot a Hypocrite
Circa 2010, Bell wasn't a company known for good customer service. Or customer service at all.
Every Canadian has heard a customer service horror story about Bell. Usually about being passed through the phone lines like a hot potato, spending hours waiting for help with whatever is broken in the first place, only to be completely forgotten about and hung up on in the end!
What about today? #BellLetsTalk has been going on for 11 years and donated over $100 million dollars towards mental health in Canada. Certainly by now, Bell as a company has had the time to transform their corporate attitudes and actually embody the values they so strongly preach with #BellLetsTalk, right??
What I mean, is after 11 years, of talking this talk—about concern for Canadian's mental health, telling us to be more understanding because you never know what someone is going through—has Bell even made an effort to walk the walk?!
I didn't know about employee conditions at Bell before the campaign, but I sure did after it ran for a few years. Bell was preaching positive mental health while inflicting the exact opposite on their staff... it could only last so long before the horror stories started coming out.
The Bell Effect
In 2017, an employee that had been with the company for 20 years came forward in an exposé about the toxic workplace culture. She called working at the call center a non-stop nightmare and had to take stress leave when she was diagnosed with a painful repetitive strain injury—carpal tunnel syndrome.
This was a result of years of pressure to hit unrealistic sales targets. If customers call with issues, they get a Client Representative; with the motto "Serve to Sell" they are essentially sales reps.
Employees are coached to talk quickly, not let customers speak, and to bury the price at the beginning of the call so they can jump right to "we can we get a technician to you at this day or time".
Management leaves no room for guilt in tricking the elderly or disabled into services they don't need or can't afford. Employees describe how coaches randomly listen in on calls without their knowledge, and rush to her desk—and either tell them exactly what to say or simply take over the call themselves—if they aren't sealing the deal fast enough.
In response, a spokesperson for Bell wrote that agents talk about products and services to ensure that customers have what is "right for them" and are "aware of new services or performance upgrades."
Right. So thats why over 600 employees contacted CBC's Go Public investigation to speak about their experience with Bell. The most alarming things they said:
"I was so stressed out that I'd be vomiting and having diarrhea at the same time. I ended up getting ulcers"
"My manager sent emails at 2 a.m. comparing my sales stats to the rest of the company, or he would call me at 3 in the morning to ask why I was off my sales targets. It was relentless.
"You better hope you don't get sick. If you don't meet your numbers, we're going to show you the door."
"Managers don't want to know what their star performers are saying to customers. They hit their goals by being unethical—not telling customers about a two-year contract, or that a promotional price is going to go up after a few months."
Obviously so committed to change :( into :) though ... (Canadian Out Of Home Marketing & Measurement Bureau. 2015)
Philanthropy VS Social Responsibility
If you ask an expert how we can support mental health, they would say that we need adequate employment, affordable housing, and social services for all. Not a glossy ass campaign from Canada's most complained about telecom company.
At the beginning at this blog, I asked "Can Big Corps Offset Bad Customer Service with Philanthropy?". I'm going to give that a big fat no. See philanthropy is just one of these fancy marketing words that got made up but only half understood.
All philanthropy is, is one's desire to promote the welfare of others, expressed especially by generous donations. It's a nice thought, but kinda just seems like lazy charity. I might as well asked "Is it okay for big corps to have bad customer service as long as they tell us they desire what's best for us? (and back it up with money)" That's basically what a toxic relationship is, and that shit is not okay!
For a company to make a meaningful impact that's worthy of praise; there needs to be deep structural change to create the change they want to see. I would say these genuine and ethical strategies fall under the umbrella of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR). CSR initiatives are based on company values and are actually integrated into the business model.
Celebrity endorsements and ostentatious donations are simply performative marketing tactics when the day-to-day actives don't reflect the same values.
Make no mistake, Bell is not taking action on mental health out of the goodness of its corporate heart. Its marketing department salivates at the earned media, and its accounting department wins tax write-offs.
Profiteering VS Racketeering
Now for the cherry on top: profiteering off the back of Ontario's prison industrial complex! How classy, eh?
Comic by Toronto lawyer Caryma Sa'd. She works with an illustrator creating comics offering commentary about current events. I used several of her posts about Bell Let's Talk day in my research. There's also a few comics about Doug Ford that will give you a chuckle.
If bad customer service and employee treatment didn't make you doubt Bell's intentions, this proves they are doing the exact opposite of what they parade around and claim to be.
In 2018-2019, 33% of all inmates admitted across Ontario had “a mental alert on their file” compared with only 7% two decades earlier. In that report, the Ontario Auditor General stated that Ontario's jails are “not suited” to provide appropriate care to the ever increasing inmates with “possible mental health issues.”
Enter Bell and their suffocating and exclusive contract with the Ontario Government.
Now, incarcerated people are only allowed to make outgoing collect calls where the recipient pays over a dollar a minute! This means that loved ones, care providers, legal counsels, and other contacts of prisoners have to pay astronomical amounts to talk to them; a mother of one incarcerated person amassed a phone bill over $6000 in just three months.
That's not all.
Calls can only be made to landline phones—something fewer than two-thirds of Ontarians currently possess. People have reported having to pay $1 to pick up the call. Don't worry, you won't get to spend much more than $30 a call because they are capped at 20 minutes anyway.
Not only are prisoners restricted in ways to contact their support systems, they can't even call mental health or 1-800 lines, because their phones don't have access to those switchboards... I'm sorry but WTF.
You're telling me Canada's so-called "1# Telephone Provider" cannot solve that exclusively telecom issue?
You are the sole phone provider.
You claim you want to talk about mental health.
You are literally exploiting a part of our population that is already disproportionately racialized, queer, and from low-income households.
Don't wait for our government to speak up either.
The only reason these facts are even public is because a lawyer filed a Freedom of Information Act in 2017. The first 4 years of Bell’s contract with Ontario’s prisons was kept a secret. The actual amount of kickbacks the government lined their pockets with, remains a secret.
The deal states: "There shall be no charges payable by the ministry under the contract to the supplier unless otherwise agreed upon". Normally you expect your government to step in and start slapping hands of corporations that step too far or take too much.
No, instead they kept that their little secret.
They also chose to fairly liberal with slices of the pandemic relief pie. I'm not saying they welcomed big telecom to the Canadian Emergency Wage Subsidy, but they weren't very strict or specific to disallow them either.
The subsidy is a federal program that covers a portion of employees’ salaries in order to keep those workers from being laid off, yes a great thing lots of smaller businesses need. Large businesses, like the kind that can afford to raise dividends for shareholders during the pandemic, do not need to be dipping into that fund.
But they have, in fact, taken $122 million in pandemic-related labour subsidies. Again, real classy Bell.
Meanwhile, I actually know contract workers for Bell that bust their ass for that company, yet are denied a slight raise, or a full time position that would give them benefits.
Really, how greedy can you be?
Unfortunately, this is just one telecom company, in one country. It will really come down to consumers holding corporations accountable for their bullshit. It's a slow process, but I hope this blog makes a little dent; I know I really learned a lot writing and researching this, and I hope you do too!
If you've read this far, why not share it? I'd love to hear other people's thoughts and what surprised you the most. Personally, I hadn't a clue about the prison profiteering until this year.
Shout out to our Canadian lawyers fighting the good fight! But especially these two I came across in my research:
Caryma Sa'd made the awesome comic that drew my attention to the prison problem and inspired me to finish this blog
Michael Spratt for filing that initial Freedom of Information Act informing the public of the government's unconscionable deal with Bell
Oh yeah, I was going to do a bit on the mysogyny and whiteness of of it all, but it seems we ran out of time for the day! Instead enjoy Michael Buble showing us what it might look like to struggle with mental health for Bell's 2021 campaign.
Bonus! #BellLetsTalk2022
Critics continue to call out the campaign’s inattention to structural and systemic factors that affect mental health, such as racial and colonial violence.
So this year, Bell has featured 46 profiles of celebrities and community members sharing their experiences with mental illness. All of them contributing to a narrative of individual responsibility and celebrating when they are “cured” and can return to productivity.
Sure, many of those profiles touch on trauma, loss, and isolation, as well as harassment, discrimination and bullying (particularly people of colour and queer people), but none of them address the root issue. None of the testimonials critique the psychiatric industry, the criminal justice or police system, or discuss systemic discrimination and violence.
Bell’s depiction of mental illness is one deeply neoliberal, advocating for capitalist conformity and returning to '“normal”. Yet, it’s depicted as an individual problem, detached from the culture and systems that are producing stigma and mental illness.
If we genuinely want to effect meaningful change, the conversation needs to shift away from the feel-good overcoming narratives.
Bell Let’s Talk, about racial and colonial violence in relation to mental health. Let’s talk about the mistreatment of patients. Let’s talk about the greed of the medical industry and our government and how they fail citizens.
Bell Let’s Talk, about how our culture is ingrained with racism, homophobia, fatphobia, ableism, and overall judgemental and individualistic attitudes. These are the root causes of both stigma and mental illness.
People with mental illness don't need more talk. They need action.
