Update on support

[Dave_M]

Hello Community,

I want to give you an update on where we are at right now, since the last time I did so was last week. 

First, I want to start off by thanking you all for the continued patience and support you have demonstrated over the last two weeks. We realize many of you have had no service or incomplete service for days now and I apologize for this. I can assure you that our entire team is working tirelessly to get through the backlog as fast as possible and as effectively as possible.

To manage your expectations, you should know that our current average time to first response is 12 days. That means that as I write this, we are answering customer messages that were submitted on Friday, Nov 19^th, 2016.

Our system pools all Community posts, private messages to the MODS, and social media messages into one feed, and we are working through each of these in chronological order – first in, first out. This way we address the issues that have been going on the longest. Again, we appreciate your patience.

The high level of interest in our promotional plan also brought to light some fractures in our systems and opportunities to improve our support. We will be doing an in-depth review of lessons learned once we’re done going through customer support requests, but in the meantime, I wanted to share some of the most obvious opportunities we have identified:

• A ticketing system for customer support inquiries that acknowledges receipt of your issue, provides a ticket number upon receipt, lets you know where you are in queue and when you can expect to hear back from a moderator
• A cleaner way to organize tickets by type of issue so we can better prioritize
• Activating and porting simultaneously failed for a greater percentage of customers than we had seen before so a group of colleagues from our technology team are investigating quick fixes for these

Unfortunately, these lessons learned won’t be fixed overnight and won’t be implemented quick enough to improve support for those in the queue right now. But, you do have our commitment that we will focus on improving this process.

Finally, to help us manage our volume of requests, we have a couple of asks for our customers who were with us before the Fall promotion:

• If you future dated your plan to change to the Fall promotion and you see in Self Serve that the plan change failed, please give us 72 hours from your plan renewal date before you contact us. We’ve identified an issue that is delaying this change, but the change will happen.
• If there is an inaccuracy in your rewards, we would ask you to please message us after December 5^th to get those fixed. We will make sure you get all the rewards you are entitled to, but we want to make sure we are prioritizing customers with no service in the short term.

Once again, I want to thank you for your patience and for sticking with us through what has been a busy and challenging time. We are grateful to have you all in our Community and look forward to building a bright future together.

Sincerely,

Dave

[JMCD]

But a disclaimer does nothing to help shorten the backlog queue and would only add to it. What I meant was that not allowing new activations would give the mods a chance to catch up to get wait times down to a reasonable number. IMO the main objective should be to have everyone having functional service and low wait times. Ultimately, more staff and a more reliable system is needed, but a short-term solution ought to be implemented.

[imm1304]

@Reco, the PM staff reset your 90-day plan to start on the day your line is active and you are able to use it.  So, you won't have paid for the week or 12 days that you may be left waiting for the new account to have service.  

As per stopping new customers from joining PM, despite all the backlog, its still a small percentage of people who are experiencing the errors at activation.  I know it totally sucks when you get unlucky and are stuck without service, but the system is not completely broken either.  

 EDIT:  @JMCD, instead of stopping the new activations, just a disclaimer on the activation page would be sufficient.  Disclosure that in the even that the activation fails, the current wait times are X days as we are busy clearing backlog from the very popular promo we just ran.  Then the customer is free to make an informed choice.  

[JMCD]

Reco, that is an excellent idea. Seriously, stop new activations and explain why until this mess is sorted out. 2 weeks for a reply and possibly not even a resolution is entirely unacceptable. Many people NEED their phones for work/family. Companies need to learn how to do controlled growth to avoid issues like this.

[imm1304]

@hda413,  What you are experiencing sounds atypical.  Could it be that your specific issue required a tech support ticket and the resolution was beyond the ability of the forum mods?  

I am sure I would be stressed if one-line replies to further the communication took 1 week per reply.  

Anyways, I wish you a speedy resolution moving forward.  It would be great to hear in a few months from now that you are enjoying the PM service/coverage while the savings start to add up.  

[Reco]

Thank you @Dave_M, for this update, but still, this is very troublesome. It is good to hear anything from someone at PM (since all my messages to the moderators remained unanswered), but it is really sad to hear that the backlog is 12 days and there is no prioritization of issues .

With 12 days of backlog, Public Mobile should stop accepting new customers and adding more miserable people to the queue.

I signed up and tried to port my number on Friday (November 25th), my credit card is charged and yet I have no service. Public Mobile is charging us on a daily basis, so PM should reimburse the fees that correspond to the dates between signing up and the actual day the service is provided if the gap is more than 3 days.

I appreciate the long term improvements that are mentioned in the announcement, but Public Mobile should also seriously consider short term fixes such as stop accepting new customers until backlog is eliminated.

[danette77]

Clearly what's needed here is not just a new ticketing system but more staff! If the current mods are taking 12 days to respond that is just sad. I remember when I joined Public Mobile about 6 months ago I'd get a response often in minutes, it was one of the things I loved about you. I have two friends who ported their numbers 2 weeks ago and still can't receive incoming calls or texts, but still no reply from the mods. Yikes, hire more staff to keep up!

[apearse]

Well said @Dave_M, thank you for the thoughtful response and update. Thanks for setting expectations and indications of what is happening behind the scenes.

[hda413]

@imm1304 I'm pretty sure they don't at least for the current backlog.  I'll tell you that I am driven pretty crazy at the moment because my case has been open for almost a month with about a week+ between replies. This also includes a random "Is your service now working?" message between weeks while newer cases are being resolved.

I've seen a few others had the same issue as well.

[amills]

@theoc198 Yes however that section seems to moves around with different topics selected adhoc-ly by someone.  I wanted something more direct.

Okay so i found it directly at the following location:

Community Homepage -> Community -> Public Mobile Communcity -> Announcments

@Dave_MI hate to tell you this but you're making a corporate or company announcement that affects ALL customers.  No one will know to check in on the site exactly when you make the announcement nor will they know how to drill into that spot to look for your message.  Why on god's green earth hasn't this been pushed to everyone's email or inbox so that they can be alerted?  Do you realize some of us have to constantly come back to the site each day and poke around for some bit of information?

So anyways, your communication is helping and it lessens the burden of now waiting 12 days for my entire group that I have brought on to your company.  Send us update emails please.  My anxiety is going through the roof logging into the community everyday.

Thanks.

[CaNuCk07]

@mendy  Good luck finding a cheaper provider with a network like Telus.  Going to be looking for awhile.

[mendy]

@imm1304

I've messaged a mod yesterday, but to be honest, I've lost faith in PM and am looking at alternative providers. I get this is a self-serve provider, but having to chase them down and waiting nearly a month just to get some sort of reply is unacceptable.

[theoc198]

@amills

Check featured topics. 

[srlawren]

@Dave_M thanks for this update, it was definitely needed.  I'm saddened that the queue is still as long as it is, but hopeful that the velocity of dealing with issues is steadily increasing.  Please try to keep us posted regularly if you can, on the date currently being processed.

Thank you as well for acknowledging the issues in an open and public manner, and for your committment to improvement.  Unfortunately as you say, it doesn't help anybudy stuck waiting today, but any improvements going forward will help prevent this horrible backlog in the future.  Right now you guys are obviously all-hands-on-deck putting out fires, but I'm glad to hear you are committed to working on the root causes and not just the symptoms (once things settle down a bit more).

Thanks again to our tireless moderators team (I won't tag you all here but you know who you are!) and the staff behind the scenes helping them.  

[amills]

Is there a way to get to these announcements from the Community homepage?  I got linked to this page from a customer.  There is nothing in the Community homepage that is the Announcement section unless I'm not seeing it.

Thanks,

[imm1304]

@mendy, they are answering from the 19th of November today.. so I am feeling sad for you.   Please send a message again and mention that you wrote to them on the 16th and now assume that the previous message won't get a reply.  

@hda413  I am fairly sure that once a PM staff replies, they keep the back and forth communication open until resolution.  The 12-day delay is only for the initial response at the moment.  It would completely drive people crazy if they had to wait 12 days for each reply in the middle of a back-and-forth communitcation.  

[Pottertons]

Thanks for the update. 

Unfortunately, I had already PM'd a mod regarding the plan change error so my apologies for being hasty. 

[Watoko]

Really looking forward to the ticketing system. While this public forum may have worked when your customer base was much smaller (as you guys were able to turn requests around in a matter of hours), it is evident that a more organized system is required to manage your significantly larger customer base.

Thanks for listening and I hope that everyone without service can have everything fully working as soon as possible!! People need to spread the Christmas joy through phone calls and text messages!!

[hda413]

@Dave_M A better ticketing system will obviously help but you need to ensure that if a ticket is open and not closed yet that there is some follow up until the ticket is closed.  It makes no sense for an issue to be opened, wait 12 days for initial response, I send a reply, wait 12 days for another response, etc.

When I see mods responding to others issues even for things like fixing rewards and brand new porting issues when I've sent many replies, new mod messages, tags, replies to threads, twitter, for my original issues starting Nov. 3, it get very frustrating.

[mendy]

I made a post (and private messaged mods) on the 16th and I have yet to recieve any sort of response. I am honestly considering changing to a more suitable serivice provider. 

[JMCD]

One can hope this backlog clears quickly, especially as they work through the issues on the 24th or prior. After that I imagine there are less signups.

[Chaos_Scorpio]

Great news to read 🙂 

[BlueTruck]

@Dave_M, appreciate the update - I had no issues getting my sim activated and got my number ported over from Wind in less than an hour.

This is not to say that my signup was 100% worry-free, as I never received my original sim (I used a friend's who decided not to sign up), and I have yet to be grandfathered into the fall promo plan. As long as these issues are eventually resolved then I am OK with continuing to wait for resolution.

That being said, a 12-day average initial response time is unacceptable for those who are unlucky enough to be without service, especially if it was through no fault of their own.

If I could make a couple of suggestions that IMO could be implemented immediately (if they haven't been already)?:

• remove or deprecate the lower graphic from the Community home page (the one with the airplane); even when viewed full-screen on my desktop, meaningful content begins at the very bottom of the page 
• include a date-stamp in the title of future "Update on support" Announcements
• in the short term, have dedicated resources scroll through the aggregated support feed (Community posts + PMs + social media msgs) chronologically, and categorize based on issue type and priority, and assign resources based on priority - any issue resulting in lack of service should take precedence over "where are my referral credits"?
• acknowledge that PM has read and is aware of the issue - this alone will greatly reduce the unnecessary traffic you are likely receiving due to lack of any kind of response. Ideally this would also include a canned response as to when one can expect to receive resolution of their particular issue

I'm sure your support team is working very hard on dealing with the influx of new customers due to the fall promotion - it's a clear sign that the Canadian mobile industry was in need of disruption. Based on the many, many positive comments from pre-existing customers I am confident that in the end we did the right thing by making the switch to PM!

[McLaren]

Thanks for the update, there is progress and appreciate all the staff's effort's

[Diceman]

Thanks, @Dave_M!   I appreciate the update.   Can we continue to get updates every few days on how the backlog queue is proceeding?

[hopetindall]

Thank you @Dave_M

[pn]

DO ALL PUK ISSUES FIRST!  THOSE SHOULD CLEAN UP A LOT AND ARE A VERY QUICK FIX!!!! UNDER 30 SECONDS.

[pn]

DEAR DAVE,

SEND ME A CREDIT THEN IF YOUR PEOPLE ARE GOING TO CONTINUE TO REFUSE TO ANSWER MY REQUEST TO GET A PUK CODE (THIS IS SOMETHING THAT SHOULD ALREADY BE ON OUR SELF-SERVE OPTIONS) SO OBVIOUSLY THIS COMPANY FORCES US TO REQUEST THE PUK SO THAT IT CAN SAVE ON THE LENGTHY TIME PERIOD WE DONT HAVE USE OF OUR PHONES.

GET SOMEONE TO SEND ME MY PUK!!!!! THIS IS A SIMPLE SIMPLE, SIMPLE, SIMPLE REQUEST AND SHOULD NOT TAKE SO LONG - PLUS AS ALREADY MENTIONED, IT SHOULD BE A SELF-SERVE REQUEST.

VERY DISAPPOINTED AND STILL NO PHONE LINE!!!

[Kraekin]

Thank for the update, but im sorry am I the only one who thinks people with NO service due to no fault of their own should maybe be a bit higher on the list? I know some might think this unfair, but I find it a bit inappropriate that a company would let customers have no service for so long.

[CFAguy]

Thanks for the update. Looking forward to a normalized situation with PM.

[ajanda]

Hi @Dave_M a fellow member @ad20 had messaged @Mary_M on Nov 20 around 12am. They are transferring there line from Chat-R and have faced a porting issue. Thank you for the update on this much needed information. 12 days is a really long time. I hope you guys can get to this request by today/tomorrow.

Thanks