Another important update for Ciena Partners

It is good to see that nearly half of the Jump Partners who are participating in the Ciena Pilot have now signed up one or more students in their area. Over 80 families with school-aged children are already benefitting.

But as partners sign up their first customers, they are discovering little challenges in remembering exactly what to do in terms of our back-end processes.

Yesterday a partner signed up their first customer and issued a new modem but then discovered the family already had a Jump modem. The family said “thank you very much for the new modem; we’ll bring the old one back”.

Unfortunately, issuing a new modem to family that already has a Jump connection creates a number of problems:

(1) Ciena modems are exactly the same as standard Jump modems; the only difference is the Jump plan (the Ciena Plan) that is applied to the customer’s account linked to the modem.

(2) We have an ongoing national shortage of modems; we do not issue replacement modems when the current one is working perfectly well and in the case of Ciena customers, this is a back-end process in terms of provisioning a new plan on the customer’s account (nothing to do with the hardware).

(3) Customers are unable to activate a replacement modem using the same email address until their old modem goes through our Modem Returns process (where the customer’s account is de-linked from the modem), and this generally takes up to 24 hours.

(4) Customers could use a different email for the replacement modem but then they would not be able to transfer any residual funds from their existing account to their new one.

So, any partner traversing this path is creating a lot of problems for their customer, when all that is needed is a new Profile Form (where the details of the existing modem are recorded) and the Ciena Referral Form. The Skinny Team then works their magic to reprovision the customer’s existing modem for the Ciena Plan. No new accounts to be set up. No new WiFi passwords needed. No modems to be returned. Simple as!