I’m seeing a TON of posts lately about people whom have been physically close to the US border but not crossed and are getting charged EasyRoam when they should not. This is a known issue that can occur when a phone picks up a stronger signal from a US operator tower near the border. Yes, there are ways to prevent this from happening but apparently the workaround is not generally known as I keep seeing person after person showing up here to complain/ask for a credit.
This got me thinking--could there be a better way?
One thing that came to mind is the Shock-Free Data feature. What I’m suggesting is to modify that approach and use it for Easy Roam, to make sure the usage is intentional.
How would it work?
- Customer is near the border and the phone connects to a US-based tower
- Koodo already knows this condition and sends a “Welcome to USA” text message today
- Instead of doing that, what if Koodo:
- Temporarily blocks all services to the phone other than texts to and from the SMS short code (appears to be 7626 today) and of course emergency calls via 911 which must always be available.
- Sends the customer a different text that indicates their phone has connected to a US tower and effectively asks “did you mean to do this?” or “are you currently travelling in the USA”? And gives them an option like “reply with ROAM to enable the Easy Roam feature for the rest of your trip. If you did not mean to use roaming, do not reply and your phone will automatically switch back to a Koodo tower when you are within range”. Obviously some better wordsmithing and explainer text would be needed.
- If the user does nothing, then continue to block the services until such time as they connect to a Canadian tower
- If the user replies with “roam”, then start their Easy Roam and enable their full services.
- For the remainder of the trip (i.e. until such time as they connect again to a Canadian tower upon returning home), no further prompts would be required for additional days of Easy Roam.
I don’t know how feasible this is, and/or what complexities this might introduce with the roaming partner networks and systems. But I thought it was worth suggesting. It would save a lot of customer frustration and agent time investigating and crediting.
