I am writing this post for my mother, because she was unable to perform this task by herself, not because she is incomprehensive, but the fact that the UI to human interaction is "not designed well", let's put it that way.
This afternoon she was unable to make or receive any phone calls, but the messages worked fine, she had tried everything from restarting the phone/changing a phone, resetting network settings/turning on and off all connections to the phone, to checking account status, payment status. Nothing worked, so the best bet is that something went wrong on the public mobile's side, which is completely reasonable since this is the first time in 4 years that we ever had trouble. But what I can not forgive is the fact that the design of the website is a complete disaster.
First of all, you need to create an additional account if you want to submit a ticket or make a thread, it is repetitive task but it makes sense since you are trying to separate customer accounts from community accounts for better management, even though it creates additional tasks for the user and forces them to memorize additional log in information.
Secondly, the verification when submitting the ticket. She spent 2 hours this afternoon trying to prove to a website that she is herself, the legit owner of the account, and what was the cause? She capitalized the initials, without realizing that she has her name all in lowercases on the main account, and the website simply checks if the 2 string values matched. So much time could have been saved if you simply put "name must match with ones in My account exactly", or have them compare the letters only, and she had to choose the 4 digits, because she could not log in with "my account credentials" because it kept saying error logging in even though the log in informations were correct, and no error messages were provided such as"wrong username" or "can not connect to database".
Third, after the submission of the ticket, even though it says the tickets were submitted successfully, there is no private messages to be seen anywhere on the profile page, and after clicking into the "see copy of image", it literally looks like the picture down below. it did not provide any accountable feedbacks to the user other than the "success message".
My mother had more troubles than the 3 listed above such as the ones with chat bot, kept getting 404s after clicking on submit a ticket from google, I should probably not make this into a huge deal since a customer support just replied suggesting that the ticket submission worked properly, but I feel like these are actual problems that needs to be fixed, and it would aid more people in the future.
Edit: Problem was solved by refreshing the status on the account(by an agent), the whole process took me less than 30 minutes including the post because I understand how the website works behind the scenes. Yet my mother spent her whole afternoon on it, and could not figure out what went wrong with the verification and the ticket system, so please, change your UI to make it more user friendly.
It's unfortunate this was so time consuming. However, you are posting this to a community (customer) board. We are all customers here, not customer service agents.
Hopefully someone from Public Mobile will see your post and feedback your concerns. It's good to hear you got it solved. 😊
