The perils of SIM swapping @ Xmas
Rating: Why hasn’t Orange bought into remote diagnostics
by Tony Dennis
Elsewhere I’ve just recounted the sad tale of
a British woman given a spanking new Sony Ericsson Walkman handset by her son
for Xmas. And it didn’t work properly.
I eventually managed to get to the bottom of the problem for the pair. The
answer was simple. Her SIM card wasn’t correctly provisioned for data.
I don’t think this will prove to be an isolated incident because it resulted
from a very common practice. That is, a recipient removing the SIM which came
with the new pre-paid handset and inserting an old existing SIM instead.
The result, in this case, was that the poor
woman couldn’t access the mobile web and download music to her phone. Which she
naturally expected it would be easy since it is, after all, a Walkman phone
designed for playing downloaded tracks.
Unfortunately, the incident showed up a failure in the provider’s technical
support process – Orange UK’s, in fact. When she called in, the agent blinded with science by referring to WAP
and GPRS.
Even with my intervention, getting Orange to believe that the SIM card had never been provisioned for data wasn’t easy.
Eventually an agent sent an OTA SIM update and the problem was resolved. She
actually cross-sold a new data tariff package to the owner as well which was
impressive move.
But surely situations like this shouldn’t still exist? What has happened to all
those remote diagnosis packages which have been demonstrated to me over the
years? Why wasn’t Orange using one?
I reckon the investment in diagnostics would pay itself back for three reasons.
Firstly, there would be improved customer satisfaction. Secondly, the operator
would avoid the cost of a perfectly functional handset being returned with no
fault found. Thirdly and finally, it would help to boost content sales.
How many more handsets are there out there with no access to the mobile web
through what is, after all, a very simple problem to cure?
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