Sometimes sorry doesn’t seem to do it. Not even if you give away free calls and SMSes for a day to assuage customers who have been kept out of a mobile network for about five hours.
Certainly, M1 CEO Karen Kooi’s personal appeal to disgruntled M1 customers today, in the form of a mass SMS, hasn’t sat well with many users, who quickly took to the telecom operator’s Facebook page to express their unhappiness with Tuesday’s outage.
In her message, Kooi said she took the incident seriously and would “spare no effort” in enhancing M1’s network. Rather than win back customers, it may have drawn more flak.
Typical of many postings, an angry user Patrick Ng asked on the operator’s Facebook page: “Can I reject your goodwill gesture because I can afford to pay for it?”.
A number of other users say that they still cannot send SMSes or receive calls, despite M1 declaring that all services have been restored by around noon yesterday.
The outage, suspected to be caused by call processing software, started from 7am and prevented users from calling or sending SMSes. It is the operator’s third major outage in 13 months, according to a report in Today.
M1 had just been fined a record S$1.5 million in October last year, for an outage that lasted almost three days in January 2013.
Even the Minister for Communications and Information, Yaacob Ibrahim, has taken the rare step of weighing in on the matter this time.
“It has been a frustrating experience for M1 customers, especially having just experienced other disruptions in very recent months,” he wrote on his Facebook page, reported The Straits Times.
With pressure mounting, it doesn’t look like M1 will be waving off concerns about its network quality after the latest disruption to services. This, despite offering free local calls and SMS and MMS messages to customers this Sunday.
The Infocomm Development Authority has already told M1 to conduct a thorough investigation, while it carries out its own probe to determine the appropriate action to take.
Worryingly for Singapore’s smallest cellphone operator, the government regulator said it would take into consideration the outages that have occurred in the past year as well.
as an M1 customer, I find the regulatory fines imposed on M1 thus far laughable. S$1.5 million is a paltry 1 percent of their FY2012’s profit after tax. And how does one decide the monetary value of the losses suffered by M1 customers during such outages? M1’s payout per share was S$0.129 for FY2012. Perhaps these days it might pay more to be an M1 shareholder than an M1 customer!
bad bad experiences, not only once.
Was trying to call in again on 6 feb 2014. was on hold for 29 mins listening to voice recording.
can that be improved ?..my dear m1
avoiding calls because of last incident ? make inprovement if not !!!
try calling in m1 using non m1 customer…GUARANTEED a much much shorter answering time…that what i did (s) within 6 mins. only want more customer without
improving on FEEDBACKS.
Complex systems break down. Inconvenience isn’t fun. I’m not making excuses for M1 / SMRT etc. However, the intolerance of breakdowns and the entitled manner online responses are being thrown around is not helpful in the long run.
Assuming that failure will strike every sector periodically, and assuming that most people posting critical notes are working and have some level of responsibility / accountability, poster should ask – what when its my turn to cop the flak?
Yes its easy, easier than ever before to rain dissatisfaction on ever more public forums.
But what message do you want leaders to take:
Stay aloof: get called ‘atlas’
Apologize: get criticised
Wow – what joy. Good motivation to seek greater compensation, stay away from the madding masses in more exclusive spaces, put one’s kids away from the common complaining winger folk. …. Who gains in the end? not the ‘poor’ for sure.
Is Karen Kooi another business person that is clueless about technology?
this is probably a similar case as SMRT. the board of directors choose a CEO to bring in the profits, M1 did that with lots of cost cutting and has attain great level of profitability in recent years, however similarly to SMRT, there are never free lunch in this world, quality and resilience drops …. things break apart …. should these decision makers review their selection criteria? maybe the cost of such outage is still manageable from a profitability point of view ….
Free calls and SMS cost very little to the company. Instead they should give free data for one month.