Jump Modem Returns – Why does the Skinny Care Team keep referring customers to partners?

William Chou from Te Manawa Library in Auckland has recently raised this question and to be fair, he isn’t the first one to do so.

William advised us that there had been at least three instances at Te Manawa during the last two months where the Skinny Care agents had advised customers reporting a faulty Jump modem to go to the library, “as it would be faster”. But as William pointed out, this conflicts with my previous posts (and as it happens, the Jump Partner Guide).

Here’s an extract from my April 2025 post:

It seems that part of the confusion arises when Skinny Care agents mistakenly direct customers to Jump partners for replacements. Please note: Skinny agents should never refer customers to partners for replacement modems. If they confirm the modem is faulty, they should complete the Modem Returns form instead.

So William is quite right to question whether our processes have changed.

The short answer is that our agreed processes have not changed. The challenge that we seem to have is training new Skinny Care agents. The agents are dealing with both regular Skinny products and Skinny Jump, and we do have quite a lot of unique procedures for Jump, especially around the distribution and return of modems, and are regularly making tweaks to Jump processes. I can understand that this could be quite a challenge for Care Agents to keep up to date with.

I know the Jump Squad in Spark provide regular updates and training for Care Agents and all they can really do is keep issuing reminders of the correct procedures.

But we also know that some Jump partners are happy to issue replacement modems. There are problems in doing this, especially around timings for delinking the faulty modems from customers’ accounts. So despite the instructions in the User Guide (does anyone read user guides these days???), customers will keep coming to partners for faulty replacements.

But we want this to be your choice, not feeling that others, e.g. Care Team, are handing on work onto you that they should be dealing with.

How do we fix this? Frankly, I don’t know. Maybe persistence? So please keep alerting me (jump@diaa.nz) to any instances where customers are saying “Skinny told me to come to you for a replacement modem“. In a perfect world it would be great to know the name of the Agent providing this wrong advice, or as a minimum, the day and time of the call.