Interesting Observation

[ShawnC13]

I have noticed that Shazia_K is around fixing problems and posting which is a great sign.  With a few of her posts I am noticing that there was no account number provided during port or incorrect IMEI number.  I am wondering how the backlog would have been if people had been extra careful and entered the correct information.  The automated system is only as good as the information it gets.  With all the user created errors it has extended the time it is taking to get to customers that have a system based error which is creating huge frustration for them but is not entirely the fault of PM.

[KK]

I agree that PM needs to put some resources towards improving their forms for ease of use and client education.

I see a lot of existing clients criticizing new clients for making mistakes and exonerating PM of all responsibility on that basis. I do think that PM bears some responsibility for making thier forms more user friendly and for providing applicants with the education and information to help them successfully activate thier accounts. Criticizing people for not checking the forums first for glitches and issues is just silly. Plus, this will be to the benefit to the bottom line. It will reduce operating costs to PM and improve the brand name.

[amills]

I think a lot of assumptions are being made.  No where did I say fixing a porting form needs to priority one.  Secondly, you are talking to a person that didn't have 3 accounts activated and had zero service for 15 days.  To be honest with you, to this day I still haven't recieved 1 bit of contact from anyone at Public Mobile.  I had to go find a way to fix it myself by calling Telus.

Also, thank you for the history lesson of where PM came from and what they had or didn't have in the past.  It's irrelevent to all people without service today.  Yes, I agree that there will be lessons learned and things will be fixed next time.  But guess what?  They are a business and it's a rough world.  People have left and some are filing complaints with CCTS.  You can make excuses for them all you want but this failure is enough to severly affect their reputation and affect their business as a whole.  It's basically their price point that is helping them hold onto customers right now and nothing else.

Now having said that, what I've read around is that the mods do a great job "normally".  But today, they are being completely mismanaged by the powers that be.  For example, they should have had a dedicated person simply contacting all the customers that have issues like 15 days ago and giving them continuous updates.  Does that require a whole big process of lessons learned and for a redo to get things right? No.  That could have been done on day 2.  Infact, I don't even know if they have that set up 15 days later.

Sorry PM, you're a business, get your things in order.  No sympathy given.  No excuses given.  I'm expecting to be compensated for this when the dust settles.  They're lucky they are not being sued by my friend who is a business owner for lost business due to a 15 day outage.

[WearySky]

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@amills wrote:

I am speaking about today's scenario.  There are people leaving based on today's scenario and the lack of service based on, again, today.  If they are expecting 1000s of new accounts, then infact you're agreeing with me that the form is not adequate.

Just out of curiosity, where do you get the idea that only a couple of hours are lost?  It's been 15 days times 3 people with just my referals.  And like I said, 1 of which was because he typed in the account number wrong.  So really, 15 days lost service because he made a human error?  I call BS on PMs part.

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Yes, and the problem *today* is that they obviously *didn't* expect thousands of new accounts.  It's super obvious that they didn't expect anywhere NEAR the number of people that they actually ended up getting with the 4GB promo in November. They've already said they're planning on making some significant changes before doing something like that again, and they have far bigger systemic problems than the porting form to worry about.  At least the porting form actually works, for the most part.  A huge number of people during the promo simply had failed activations, where they tried to sign up, it took their money, but didn't actually finish their activation correctly so they had no service.  That's probably going to take priority over validation changes on the porting form, in the near future.

And the idea that only a couple of hours are lost is exactly how the service around here works when there isn't thousands of people coming in per day (ie, every time other than during the promo period in November).  If your friend had signed up in, say, September and made the same mistake, his problem would almost certainly have been fixed the same day.  That's the level of service that PM normally gives, because they don't, generally, have thousands of new customers signing up every day.  The promo period in November was an EXTREMELY unusual situation, one that their system quite simply wasn't designed for.  And again, they've said it opened their eyes to some important changes that are going to need to be put into place before they can think about doing something like that again.

[amills]

I am speaking about today's scenario.  There are people leaving based on today's scenario and the lack of service based on, again, today.  If they are expecting 1000s of new accounts, then infact you're agreeing with me that the form is not adequate.

Just out of curiosity, where do you get the idea that only a couple of hours are lost?  It's been 15 days times 3 people with just my referals.  And like I said, 1 of which was because he typed in the account number wrong.  So really, 15 days lost service because he made a human error?  I call BS on PMs part.

[WearySky]

Sure, and like I said - they can definitely add more validation to prevent some of the simple, stupid mistakes (though they'd have to add another scenario for "my carrier isn't listed", to handle regional carrier X that nobody has heard of before, or random VOIP provider Y.  And those people would have to be on their own.  You have to be careful when you start getting into too much handholding though, because when you overcomplicate forms you run into OTHER issues (a big problem on the web development front is end users that simply don't read instructions - and the more you give them to read, the less likely they are to read it).  

The thing is - before this promo, the porting form was perfectly adequate for what it needed to do.  It handled the vast majority of port requests no problem, and for the handful of folks who screwed it up, the mods were able to easily handle their requests in a reasonable amount of time.  No 15 days lost, maybe a couple hours.  It's all well and good to say "it's a poorly designed form" now, because it sure is if you're talking about thousands of new people coming in over a period of a couple weeks.  But that's not what it was designed for, originally.

[amills]

@WearySky  I called the Telus porting centre to get my 3 referrals fixed.  My friend typed in 10 digits instead of 9 for the account number for Virgin.  How did I know?  Because the agent told me right away without calling Virgin.  So they know.  So yes, he should know better than to type in incorrect accounts however, that could easily have been validated right on the form.  Easily.  Instead he lost service for 15 days.  Your arguement is that he should just type his account without mistakes.  Well if humans are this perfect why validate anything at all?  Infact Everything in life is validated because we are human and we error.

The pins for the other 2 non-portable account was not the authorizing pins.  We inputted their own pins.  This is because the forms didn't explain which pin they needed.  There could have easily been a leading question that said, are you the authorizing account of a shared Rogers plan.  etc.   Then the messages on the fields should adjust to the person's answer.

Now I''m not saying 100% can or has to be validated using the forms, but i can argue that 80% of the issues I've seen could have been.  So no, sorry, you can't leave these types of things just "up to the humans not to make mistakes" Especially since Punlucky Mobile is claiming to be  a "Self Service" carrier.  So ESpecially PM of all other carriers should get their forms right.

[WearySky]

@amills As far as I can tell, carriers don't have any set rules for what information they will accept when doing a port.  

And I think you're wrong when you say they proactiely reached out to potential source carriers to build this form.  This is a generic porting form, taking in all the potential data that can be used to complete a port with any carrier.  There's no way any competitor is going to happily work with PM to say "Oh sure, let me make it easier for your customers to move from us to you".

Yeah, maybe they should add in some more validation on the fields (although I think it's unrealistic to expect them to have account number validation rules for every possible provider that somebody could be moving over from, there's more than just the big guys and their subsidiary brands).  After a certain point, you have to put some responsibility on the people that screwed up putting their information in in the first place.  "You didn't tell me that I typed my account number in wrong, so it's all your fault" is kinda silly.

[amills]

PM has clearly proactively reached out to the potential source carriers and built this form.  There is only so many carriers and each carrier has their own requirements.  For one thing, they should lead the from with which carrier are you porting from.  Then they should follow that up with all the rules that the source carrier expects from the proactive research they would have done.  Then they needed to have built all the validations of the source carrier.  I understand there is no real time feedback for corrections.  However, if PM's form preemptively builds things into the form a lot of the shinanegans going on here is unnecessary.   Infact, I would argue that it's not the mods fault.  It's the form designer's and poor business logic it uses to validate the fields.

Let me give you an example.  If you are porting a number from Virgin, Virgin only has a 9 digit Account number.  SURELY, that can be preemptively researched and built into the "Account" field as a validation.  So if someone puts in 10 digits accidentely, presently it's being sent that way to Virgin.  It should be instead be rejected locally by the PM form.

[amills]

@WearySky  PM has clearly proactively reached out to the potential source carriers and built this form.  There is only so many carriers and each carrier has their own requirements.  For one thing, they should lead the from with which carrier are you porting from.  Then they should follow that up with all the rules that the source carrier expects from the proactive research they would have done.  Then they needed to have built all the validations of the source carrier.  I understand there is no real time feedback for corrections.  However, if PM's form preemptively builds things into the form a lot of the shinanegans going on here is unnecessary.   Infact, I would argue that it's not the mods fault.  It's the form designer's and poor business logic it uses to validate the fields.

Let me give you an example.  If you are porting a number from Virgin, Virgin only has a 9 digit Account number.  SURELY, that can be preemptively researched and built into the "Account" field as a validation.  So if someone puts in 10 digits accidentely, presently it's being sent that way to Virgin.  It should be instead be rejected locally by the PM form.

[WearySky]

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@amills wrote:

if the software/form was robust in it's validations, it would not pass through the Submit button.  It is a poorly designed form with poor logic behind it.

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From what I understand about the porting process, it appears to be asynchronous.  That is - you pass the information to the old carrier, and the old carrier processes it when they get around to processing it, and then they send you back the result once they're done.  Many people have cited examples of Bell, for example, holding onto a port until they have a chance to call you to try to convince you to stay.  When you don't get immediate feedback on the data entered by the customer, there's no way to enforce any kind of validation on the form.

[ShawnC13]

I think some information is ok by some providers but others want a specific piece so why not just have it so you must provide your account number.  IMEI is a crazy way to do it as well anytime you get into numbers a lot of people will transpose numbers and there the issue is created

[amills]

@ShawnC13  Shawn, I agree and disagree.  It is a person's responsibility definitely to fill things appropriately, but if the software/form was robust in it's validations, it would not pass through the Submit button.  It is a poorly designed form with poor logic behind it.

[SD08]

Yes, an encouraging sign.  Perhaps the situation is improving because PM appears to have hired third party help to deal with porting issues, according to this post:

http://productioncommunity.publicmobile.ca/t5/Plans-Add-Ons/Moving-billing-cycle-start-date/m-p/1170...

[ShawnC13]

@rkreddyb4u Totally agree why even ask for anything else

[rkreddyb4u]

Just a food for thought - dont know why the account number is not a mandatory in this case.

[ShawnC13]

@CaNuCk07 as well I am sure some issue might be from previous provider system as well.  The user submits say a PIN but htey only take account number and therefore refuse the port.

[CaNuCk07]

@ShawnC13  Agreed!  I been around today as well seeing shazia fixing a bunch of issues, and wondered the same thing.  Would be interesting to see stats on how many issues were caused by user error.