4GB Promo plan honoured

[StickySituation]

Hi was a freedom mobile customer who switched last week to the 4GB promo. It was a bit of a rocky start, but thanks to the mods for clearing things up...

1) 2 days after signing up, my account was suspended due to the system wide glitch. My account was back in service within 6 hours of messaging the mods

2) When I signed up, my rate plan was 500mb/90days, which was supposed to switch to 12gb/90days within 72 hours. It didn't, so I messaged the mods last night and this morning they replied saying they manually upgraded my plan.

I kind of enjoy this system of messaging the moderators for service. No more waiting on hold for hours to discuss billing issues or make changes. It's clean and simple. Only drawback is that things take longer to change, which can be a real problem when you have no service.

[StickySituation]

Yup, being prepared is the best way forward. I got google hangouts working on my phone so it shows the same caller ID as my PM number. At least this way I can make calls; receiving calls is still an issue. Is there some way I can set up a call/text forwarding scheme, so that if my phone is unable to connect to the towers, then my communications will be forwarded to my fongo number?

[skmkenn]

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@Acekiller wrote:

It just shifts the waiting to offline waiting.

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That's true, but with a messaging system it's easier to get other things done while waiting for a reply and if you have notifications enabled you'll be alerted as soon as you have a reply. I've usually had pretty good luck when contacting the moderator team with a turn-around time of 20 minutes to an hour. The system isn't for everyone, but overall I still believe it's better and less frustrating than waiting on hold with a call centre or being bounced around between departments.

[Acekiller]

It just shifts the waiting to offline waiting.

[Luddite]

Why not be prepared for the infrequent down times?  Been with PM 3 years and never had a service outage.

[skmkenn]

Glad to hear that everything was sorted out for you! I agree that the Community approach is overall a better model, since you have both peer-to-peer support and the ability to contact the moderators for account/billing/back end related issues that can't be solved through self-serve.

From my experience, the moderators are usually pretty quick at replying (with the exception of the system issue over the weekend but that's understandable since they had a large influx of messages to handle) and it's less frustrating than calling in and being bounced around between departments or having to speak with different representatives and receiving a different response from each one.

I still think there's some room for improvement here with more transparent and timely communication from higher up when there are issues that arise impacting multiple customers, but I believe that this support model, and Public Mobile as a whole has potential. And honestly if you compare Public Mobile's plans to what's available from other carriers on a prepaid basis they are the best value -- no pay-per-use charges to worry about, a regular style monthly plan that can give you ample data without paying out the nose for it, plus excellent coverage and network speeds.