Author: Laurence Zwimpfer

I am committed to supporting the development of New Zealand as a digitally included nation, where everyone has equitable opportunities to benefit from the digital world.

Ciena Plan – programme being extended to more regions

The Skinny Jump team has agreed to expand the reach of the Ciena programme to more Jump partners. This offers Jump households with school-aged children a fully funded Jump connection for the remainder of the 2023 school year (to the end of December 2023). Nearly 200 new families in 30 different areas have taken up this offer since the pilot extension was offered in February 2023.

You can find out more information about this programme on the Skinny Jump website and by watching our partner briefing session for those participating in the pilot (just a tip if you are viewing the recording of this webinar, for best quality viewing, we suggest you use the High Definition (1080p) setting:

We are now calling for Expressions of Interest (EOI) from other Jump partners who may be interested in offering the Ciena programme to students in your local schools. We were not able to include every partner who submitted an EOI in the pilot programme; in some cases this was because of limited capacity on Spark’s 4G cell towers. If you are still interested, please complete this new EOI and we’ll check the coverage situation again.  

Please submit your EOIs no later than Friday 16 June 2023

Jump customers being offered library cards

I learnt about a great initiative by Te Takere’s digital inclusion librarian, Leala Faleseuga, earlier this week. She explained that whenever she signs up a customer for Jump she asks them if they have a library card, and if not she is quick to sign them up. And then she can introduce them to the free eLibrary resources offered by Horowhenua Libraries, including Libby, Hoopla and Cloud Library.

I know that most, if not all library partners, are providing eLibrary services for their communities, but what impressed me about Leala’s approach is how she and her team at Te Takere are making the connection between digital connectivity and content.

I have mentioned this to a few other library partners during the week and they were quick to respond with “what a good idea!”

Our (DIAA) vision for Jump was that this would provide a pathway for communities to increase their digital skills and engagement with the digital world.

Having access to a digital device and an affordable internet device is just the beginning. Thank you to all our partners who are continuing to help their communities enjoy the benefits of the digital world.

I met with a senior government official during the week and she was so excited about being introduced to Libby by a librarian at Newtown Library in Wellington. She has now reached book number 200, thanks to Libby!

Jump Profile Forms required for all CIENA Jump Signups

Our Ciena Jump signups are moving along steadily, so thank you everyone for your efforts.

There is possibly one area of confusion that would be good to remind everyone doing Ciena signups about.

Every Ciena signup must include a Jump Profile Form, whether a new modem is being issued or not.

We are receiving some Ciena Referral Forms without a Profile Form being completed, often for customers who already have a regular Jump modem and are just seeking the additional sponsorship. But what this means is that we can’t process the application. We rely on the Profile Form to communicate with the Skinny support team that is responsible for Ciena provisioning. Ciena applicants identified through the Profile Form are extracted and added to a Google Sheet shared with Skinny. Skinny then updates this sheet when the modem is provisioned for Ciena and we advise the customer.

It would also be helpful if you can ensure that the parent authorising the Ciena application is the same person as the one completing the Profile Form. Sometimes, we are finding it difficult to match names, especially when it is impossible to read the handwritten name on the referral form.

Jump and Gmails with “+” or “.”

Now here’s a very interesting solution to one of the more challenging issues for some Jump customers.

Over the years, many partners have encountered the rather difficult situation when a customer turns up wanting a Jump modem and they already have a Skinny mobile phone account. The problem is that they cannot use the same email for both their Skinny phone account and their Skinny Jump account.

Our advice to date has been to simply set up a second email for the customer. But while this solves the problem for Skinny, we understand that it can make life more difficult for Jump customers. Having to manage two different email accounts, especially if you only have a smartphone, requires a degree of digital proficiency that many Jump customers don’t have.

The Jump App makes this a bit easier; once you have the App set up, you don’t really need to worry too much about the email that has been used. If you do forget it, you can always check your Account profile to find the email and change the password. But there will be times when your customer needs to access their Jump email account.

Tāwera Akehurst, who has recently taken over from Alan Bucheler as the Partnership Delivery Lead for Skinny Jump, pointed us in the direction of an interesting Gmail solution for situations that need different email addresses but where customers want the emails to appear in a single email account.

It is simply a matter of using the “+” or “.” symbols as part of the username. Gmail does not recognise these symbols and directs all mail to a single account.

For example: johnsmith@gmail.com is exactly the same as john.smith@gmail.com and johnsmith+jump@gmail.com

Yet for online applications like Skinny Mobile and Skinny Jump, these are recognised as three different emails. Check out the link above for some other interesting things you can do with these variants on your regular email.

Ordering supplies of Jump collateral

This is just a reminder for partners about the process for procuring additional copies of Jump collateral. This has been brought to our attention because we are expecting that many partners will have exhausted their supplies of the Modem Recovery Flyer with the sticker that we have asked you to explain to customers and make sure they stick this reminder on their modems before they take them home.

This sticker explains to customers what they need to do if they stop using their modem – return it to a nearby partner or call the Skinny Care team to arrange for a recovery courier bag to be sent.

So, how do you get more stickers if you have run out?

Go to the Stepping UP website > Partners > Partners Resources Hub > Skinny Jump resources. Scroll down and you will find:

Click on this button and you will be directed to an online order form:

Note the suggested order quantity for the Modem Recovery Flyers is 100, but this will be overkill for many smaller Jump partners, who might only issue 1 or 2 modems a month. So please adjust the order quantity (in multiples of 10) to cover the number you expect to issue during the next 12 months.

It can take a number of weeks for these supplies to arrive from the printers, so if you need something urgently, please contact Shelley (shelley@diaa.nz) and she might be able to get some on the overnight courier.

New Jump IVR a hit!

At 8.30am on Wednesday 17 May, the Skinny Jump IVR (Interactive Voice Response) went live. What this means is that Jump customers can now interact with a computer-operated phone system through voice or keypad input to get the help they need rather than going into a wait queue to speak to a Skinny Care agent.

Within an hour of the launch, Jump callers were quickly finding the IVR was solving their problems, allowing them to:

(a) hear the dollar balance on their Jump account

(b) hear their data balance (number of Megabytes)

(c) top up their account using a Skinny voucher

(d) renew their Skinny Jump plan

(e) hear how many plan renewals they have remaining for the month

(f) cancel a plan renewal

In the first week, the number of calls to live agents dropped by 40% and we are sure this also resulted in much happier customers, being able to avoid the wait queues. Furthermore the IVR never sleeps – awake 24/7.

To use the Jump IVR process, customers have to:

  1. call 0800 4SKINNY (0800 475 4669)
  2. select Option 3 for Jump
  3. enter their broadband number (0204….)
  4. enter their verification code

Step 4 is something new. Until now, this has only been required when setting up a new modem, so customers will need to have both the broadband number and the verification number ready to use the IVR.

Customers will still have the option to “press 9 to speak to a Care agent”. We encourage all partners to explain (or even demonstrate) the IVR option during the initial set-up process.

Jump Customers changing address

I had a question today from one of our partners about the process when Jump customers move to a new address. I thought this might be a good opportunity to remind all partners.

Here it is in a nutshell:

  1. Use the address checker to confirm that the customer is moving to an address with Jump coverage.
  2. If so, ask your customer to contact the Skinny Care Team on 0800 475 4669 and inform them of the new address.
  3. The customer can then unplug their modem and take it to their new address.
  4. If customers move their modems to a new address without notifying the Skinny Care Team, they could find their modem gets blocked, as this is a breach of the conditions of use.
  5. If their new address does not have Skinny Jump coverage, then the modem should be returned to the nearest Jump partner for resetting and assigning to a new Jump family, or the customer is welcome to contact the Skinny Care Team and request a pre-paid return courier bag.
  6. What they should not do, is just walk out the door and leave their Jump modem behind for the next tenant.
  7. Transferring to another family member can also be problematic, as the modem is linked to the original user’s email and any new user would require access to this email and the password in order to top up the account and purchase new data plans. So it is much better for the modem to be returned and reset (or if it is unsuitable for reuse, it will be responsibly recycled). The family member is welcome to apply for a new modem using their own email and password (assuming of course that they meet the eligibility criteria).

Special Alert for Jump Ciena Partners

We have had two Ciena customers contact us to ask why their Ciena Plan did not renew on 1 May. We escalated this to the Skinny Jump team at Spark in case this was a system glitch that could be affecting other Ciena customers.

The good news is that this isn’t a system glitch, so hopefully only two customers have been affected. The reason identified is that these two customers attempted to purchase additional data during month and when they did this, their accounts reverted to standard Skinny Jump.

The Jump team acknowledges that this could be confusing for customers and would like to remove the top-up option altogether for anyone on a sponsored plan, but this involves further software development and this could take some time.

As an immediate fix, any customer on a sponsored plan who attempts to top-up their account will now receive an error message.

This does highlight how important it is that Ciena partners carefully explain that being on a Ciena plan means they cannot top-up their accounts, as they are already receiving the maximum of 6 top-ups (210GB) each month.

We acknowledge that the User Guide and Partner Guides do not really cover this situation and this is something the Jump team is going to take a look at, but in the meantime, please make a special point of explaining this to Ciena applicants.

We will contact the two families that have raised this with us – their accounts have already been reset for the Ciena plan. Please contact us on jump@diaa.nz if any customer raises this issue with you and we can arrange for their accounts to be re-provisioned with the Ciena plan. Thank you.

Jump System Outage Resolved

4pm Wednesday 3 May 2023

Thank you everyone, for your patience, and we apologise for any inconvenience this has caused in signing up new customers for Jump.

The technical teams at Spark believe they have fixed the root cause of the Skinny Jump address checker issue. Earlier today, the Christchurch Jump team discovered that this appeared to be working again, and we have been testing addresses since then to confirm that all is well.

So, you can now return to ‘business as usual’, but please be aware that the Jump systems are still ‘settling back in, following the outage’ in the words of the Spark Jump team. They have assured us they will be continuing to monitor all the Jump systems to make sure.

And remember that if you do encounter problems with the Skinny Jump address checker, you can use the regular Skinny Broadband checker. Both use the same database for Skinny 4G coverage and availability checks.

If you do discover anything that doesn’t seem to be working as it should, please get in touch with us (jump@diaa.nz or 0800 463422) and we’ll escalate to the Spark Jump team as required.

Probably another 12 hours to fix the Skinny Jump address checker

10.00 am Wednesday 3 May 2023

Skinny technical teams have confirmed an issue with the Jump address checker, as a result of yesterday’s systems outage. Unfortunately, due to the complexity of the issue, they are estimating that it will not be fixed for at least 12 hours.

In the meantime, they have suggested the Skinny Wireless Broadband checker as an alternative workaround until the Jump address checker can be fixed.