An open letter to Spark,

Team, I’m not mad… just disappointed. This week you have managed to both delight me with exceptional customer service and frustrate me in ways I didn’t think were possible.

Let me start with the good. Your new iMessage chat support is fantastic. Earlier in the week I added a new wearable plan to my business account, and it could not have been easier. Fantastic, fast competent support.

Your new $65 Business Endless Plan with team up discount is just perfect. For $42.25 (after discount) is a whole $0.25c more than Vodafone and includes 10GB more data. You sorted out that horrible hotspot limitation. All in all, your new plan lineup is on point.

Now the elephant in the room. eSim. I moved to Spark for eSim and wearable one number support. I had a very long relationship with Vodafone and Bellsouth so it was a big deal making the move. Unfortunately, you have some crazy processes around eSim replacement. It feels like you got your brightest people in a room and asked them how can we make it harder!

You will see every year during new iPhone season lots of posts here on Geekzone about different eSim replacement processes and this year has been no different.  eSim isn’t new you’ve had it for almost 4 years now? You don’t seem to have this documented anywhere externally but this is what I have gathered, you now require an instore visit to swap eSim to apparently show ID.

Now perhaps that doesn’t seem like much of an issue when your office has a spark store on the ground floor but lets look at a few scenarios… What if I get a new iPhone on Holiday? What if I live in rural NZ? What if I don’t want to be around people because I am immune compromised? What if I’m disabled?

In my case it’s a 3 hour round trip and about 67KG of CO2 just to swap phones… Doesn’t seem very good on the sustainability front. Sustainability is a key pillar of yours.  

Now working in the industry, I do understand the risk from sim jacking. Verifying identity is important. But and this is where it gets a bit silly, you are happy for me to port out my phone number with nothing more than a text confirmation. Your also happy for me to close my account and release my number. I worked out that I could port my number out to Voda prepay and back into a new account but that would mess up my wearable.

From what I can gather getting a new eSim is the only transaction you want me to front up for is this…

I keep a few eSims so far my AT&T sim was migrated automatically as part of the new device setup. My Telstra sim was able to be downloaded from their App (after I verified my email address). This doesn’t have to be so hard. Apple have made it clear the future, or at least their version of it is a Simless one.

Spark, please take a look at this, I know you can do better!

Perhaps next month we can have a talk about ipv6? :D