This has been my first experience with PM. I applaud the approach taken of minimal support staff, dependence on community members and no physical bricks-and-mortar presence in order to bring the cost down.
I've used this model elsewhere on the Internet for a variety of things, and created some customer service interfaces as well. As I go through the PM registration process -- during the hectic period of a popular promotion that taxes the capacity of staff and the patience of the community -- some things stood out. You can't please everyone and not everything will run perfectly. But there have been some self-inflicted wounds that I have seen that IMO can be fixed with a little effort that will offer long-term benefit.
When the dust settles next week -- but not for too long, we are going into Xmas shopping season after all -- I hope PM managament looks at the logs from here and takes away some lessons. Two ommissions clearly stand out to me:
- Lack of a killer Frequetly-Asked Questions section
- Lack of a customer-facing support ticketing system
A number of repetitive questions could have easily been avoided with a good FAQ section. There was even community disagreement on some things (such as whether or not you can port a number to an existing account or need to start a new one) that could be solved. As the thread progresses, the original announcement (post #1 on the thread) could have contained an FAQ for the promotion that would be regularly edited/augmented based on ... questions that were frequently asked in the thread 
such a listing makes life easier for community support helpers and may even reduce the number of redundant posters if people have a definitive "READ THIS FIRST BEFORE ASKING" section. At very least it provides definitive answers on policy and procedures so that nobody is guessing.
Sorry, but the KnowledgeBase just doesn't work as well, at least not in my experience.
But just as critical, the lack of a good ticketing system has caused needless confusion between newcomers, mods and PM staff. Having a single place to raise a support issue -- rather than just picking the last Mod or PM staff to have posted -- will offer stability and continuity to both customer and support. A single place where someone can find the status of their request also lessens anxiety because you know your question is "in the queue" even if staff is highly backlogged. It also stops people from harrassing staff; if you know your issue is registered and awaiting action, you're not likely to pester Mods and PM staff a dozen times more, or to send the same issue to four different people who might all be trying to answer in parallel -- not a good use of peoples' time. And good ticketing systems need not be expensive, I am aware of a number of installations quite happy with the open source "Request Tracker" software.
I'm not the first one here to mention a ticketing system, but it's really important. Staff and mods will eventually be driven crazy without one. And since you depend on community members for a lot of help you don't want to burn them out either.
I hope these comments are seen in the spirit of constructive feedback, and an attempt to help. I really like the concept and really hope that it can be demonstrated to Telus that this business model is viable.
Thanks for reading this far. The promotion has probably caused a rough week for everyone and it's not over yet.
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