Plans for better 'crisis' communication?

[mforrest]

Hello Public Mobile, @CS_Agent, @Jeremy_M, @Dave_M

First, thank you for quickly resolving the outage this morning. 

I've been using your service for about a year now without any significant problems.  Reliable service + good rates mean I recommend your service to my friends.  The lack of *any* timely communication from PM today is making me reconsider these recommendations.

I fully understand that PM is a discount carrier.  I'm happy to pay less for no frills service, but I expect things to work.  When they don't work, I want to see clear, timely communication from you.  That did NOT happen today. This forum is the way you've chosen to communicate with your customers for all support issues.  I expect you to actually use it!

I fully understand that in the middle of a 'crisis' there will be conflicting/confusing information available and you don't want to say the wrong thing to us.  Saying NOTHING is worse.  

When something goes wrong, at the very least, I would expect you to create a sticky post saying something like "We are aware some of you are having problems with X.  We are investigating and will update this post when we have more information to share."  This did not happen today.  Instead, there are people creating multiple threads with NO response from PM until *just* before the issue was fully resolved.

When I joined PM last year, there was a huge problem with porting numbers and people trying to get SIM cards activated before a promotion expired.  There were also significant communication problems then.  This appears to be an ongoing problem.

Do you have a plan for 'crisis' / outage communication?  If so, it didn't work today.

What is your plan to make communication better in the future?

Can you please conduct a postmortem of this incident today and let us know:

1. What went wrong & why.

2. What you plan to do about it to prevent a future occurance

Thanks for the great phone plans, I look forward to hearing your plans for future improvements.

[kristine]

The lack of information regarding the outage has ticked me off, too. If I simply had no service, I would have figured that out pretty quickly. But the "your plan does not allow for long distance calls" thing caused me to waste a lot of time. Is this something that can be changed in the future? I was already running about 5 minutes late for work, but I wasted a lot of valuble time trying to figure out what was going on. My plan renewal was over the weekend. Did the payment not go through? Did I accidentally downgrade my plan?  I ended up half an hour late for work and lost that pay, plus had to play catch-up all day and get b*tched at by everyone. 

I work the graveyard shift and I don't drive. Having to hang out in a Tim Hortons parking lot for half an hour while waiting for my cab after calling from a pay phone is not my idea of a good time at 3:00 am. 

[Mary_M]

Hey @mforrest,

thank you for taking the time to reply.

Rest assured that the issue has been resolved and that your services are fully functional. Also keep in mind that we must answer requests in the order received, and it can sometimes take longer than expected but I can confirm that the outage has been resolved.  As customer service agents, we don't know exactly what happens in the back-end or why every single glitch occurs therefor to be quite transparent, I cannot explain it as I am simply a community moderator and not a back-end technical specialist. I am, however, here to help in any way that I can.

To clarify once again, the issue has been resolved since about 11am.

Now, I will initiate a private message - can you try responding?

Thank you,

Mary

[mforrest]

Hi @Mary_M, @CS_Agent,

PMs not working.  My reply is below.

Hi Amine,

Thanks for the reply, but now I'm confused.

@Amine_E wrote:

At this time, we are experiencing a network outage affecting multiple users. The issue prevents you from placing local calls although your plan is fully active. First and foremost, rest assured that we are aware of the issue and our team put a fix into place.

Susana_G posted that the outage was resolved at 10:30am EST

 https://productioncommunity.publicmobile.ca/t5/Phones-Hardware/Unable-to-place-calls/m-p/196613/high...

Are there still issues, is there a huge lag in your reply showing up or are you just using a boiler plate response that's out of date?

I can now make outbound calls. The outage does not appear to impact me any more. Can you please confirm if the outage is now resolved?

I had to cancel all my plans for the morning because I was unable to get in touch with others to coordinate supervision of our kids before school.  What is the plan for compensation due to this outage?  Mary_M said we should PM a MOD to get details about this. https://productioncommunity.publicmobile.ca/t5/Phones-Hardware/Unable-to-place-calls/m-p/196770/high...

I'm *really* concerned about the awful communication regarding this issue.  Is this something PM is going to respond to *quickly* or do I need to escalate the issue to the CCTS? I'd appreciate an answer in a PUBLIC forum so others can see what you're doing to make this right.  Perhaps you could reply here:

https://productioncommunity.publicmobile.ca/t5/Discussions/Plans-for-better-crisis-communication/m-p...

[Mary_M]

Hey @mforrest,

can you respond to the @CS_Agent tag? Most agents don't have personal inboxes therefor sending a message to Amine_E wouldn't work!

Thank you,

Mary

[mforrest]

Well, communication just keeps getting worse!

I sent a message to @CS_Agent this morning about the outage and got a reply from @Amine_E.  Now, the system won't let me respond via Private Message:

There aren't any personal details in my query/response.  Should I just make it all public?

[JUNA1D5HAH]

I agree with you 100%.

I expressed the same concern and requested the same communication from PM.

I really hope they see our discussions and take some action.

It will definitely make things easier in the future.

It will stop hundreds of users from messaging in the forums if there is a clear message updating us of the issue and status and possibly a timeframe of the resolution.

Let's see what happens.

[denkom]

Thanks @mforrest for starting this thread. I didn't experience the outage but I agree with all of your points. Let's get as many bravos on this post as we can and get the attention of the @CS_Agent

[will13am]

It is definitely time for Public Mobile to establish some form of communication protocol with its user base. 

[MoreYummy]

@mforrest Yes, they need to have better communication for this situation.  Especially forum is the only communication method.   

[ShawnC13]

@mforrest, I agree that communication could have been quicker.  I personally didn't experience the outage as I am in BC and have only been effected twice with network outages before and there was no mass message then to notify me.  I have also experienced outages in cable vision and when you call in to get service I was not presented with a voice recording saying there was a network outage or issues the message I got was "We are experiencing a heavier call volume then normal and the wait times will be longer".  Now this doesn't help either.  So this isn't just a PM issue I think it is all service providers need to be able to react a bit quicker and get the word out to their customers.