Broken AutoPay... Why?

[Korth]

PM's recent Announcement kindly appraised the Community of successful troubleshooting efforts, some improvements, and some bug fixes. I offer congrats - good job folks! - and I hope to see more of this stuff in my future with PM. 

And I address my suggestion about (what I believe is) a serious issue to @CS_Agent in response... 

Broken AutoPay can happen to anyone, anytime. Your AutoPay on credit card works flawlessly for many months until one day it just doesn't and even though you have the funds (credit) on account you suddenly don't have working phone service. Disrupting people's phone service annoys them, not giving people phone service they expected (think they already paid for) outrages them. Most PM customers are seemingly immune to broken AutoPay while others are plagued by it month after month (and usually get frustrated enough by it - along with the glacial delays built into PM's support model - to take their phone and their credit card somewhere else). 

It's an old problem at PM, a recurring one, a wasteful one. Numerous other businesses make their autopayment systems work so there's obviously PM's (wrong) way of implementing it and a better (right) way of implementing it. The onus should fall squarely onto PM... yet for some reason it is always the customer who gets scolded for not digging through banking and credit card and Self-Serve transaction histories. 

I can't pretend to know exactly why AutoPay breaks (although I think it's sloppy AVS configuration or ineffective interfaces between billing systems, to be honest) but whatever the problem might be it still needs to be fixed. AutoPay is supposed to help attract business, it's not supposed to "help" lose business. 

http://blog.goemerchant.com/what-is-avs-mismatch/

[Kim1971kim]

That is weird try contacting public mobile maybe

[Korth]

Maybe nothing is being done.

Or maybe something, many things have been done.

But the results speak for themselves... I have yet to see a month pass by without seeing some old and some new complaints about broken AutoPay. Sometimes it seems even more broken than usual and these complaints become the dominant forum topic of the month. If it consistently worked properly then the complaints would be unusual instead of predictable.

Existing customers who are affected are unhappy, some always leave (sometimes apologetic, sometimes angry). Other existing customers (like myself) are unaffected but apprehensive - and it's kinda ridiculous to have to make a pre-payment on a pre-payment and manually oversee an automated (but failure-prone) system to work around the issue. New customers (and Referrals) who bother to google around the Public Mobile forums before joining are already skittish so recurring complaints about simple things are instant deal breakers. So I'm perplexed by PM's apparent long-term disinterest in correcting this issue. 

[jonfirlotte]

Wow I really hope that never happens to me, the fact that it happens that often and that nothing is done about it terrible.