tl;dr: bad customer journey, and here’s the link to the authorization letter I used today.
Now for the actual post 🙂
Today I tried to transfer the ownership of a mobile number to myself.
Needless to say, it was pretty frustrating. Working in an environment where the customer journey has a very very big impact on how we do things, it’s quite difficult to experience so much toil in what should be a relatively simple and straightforward task.
One of the things that I had to do was to bring down the NRIC and an authorization letter down to the service center as the primary owner of the mobile number was not able to join me.
What was odd and mildly annoying was the fact that for what I am assuming to be a very common task which probably gets carried out many times a day, the telco provider did not provide a template for the authorization letter. I searched around the telco forum and found that although there has been many threads on this query (the earliest thread was dated 2013), for some reason the replies on the forum did not provide a template, except for the dishing of some generic instructions on what the letter should contain.
This to me is an example of a bad customer journey. I don’t suppose it would take the telco at least a month to hop through the bureaucratic layers to draft out very simple generic letter and to get it cleared by Legal. But I’m not sure why that hasn’t happened yet…
There are a few big benefits to just giving the customers this letter:
both the primary and incoming owner may not be fluent in English, and drafting such a letter may not be a simple affair.
even if they do manage to draft out said authorization letter, they will not know if the letter is good enough until they print it out, sign it, head to one of the main branches, get a queue ticket, wait, and be served by the counter staff. it would be very painful to only find out then that the letter cannot be accepted.
it requires the counter staff to read the letter and to decide if it can be used or not. i can imagine only the pain that they have to go through to reject the customer who just went through the big hassle of point #2 above.
This is just toil which wastes time, may cause potential frustration, but can be very easily fixed. Just look at the same letter is easily accessible and provided if you’re a circles.life customer.
Anyway, I managed to get the transfer done today by an excellent counter staff.
For those who made it all the way to the end of this blog post, here is a sample template you can use. It’s the same one I used this evening.
Simple, right?