We had a fairly lengthy broadband outage in our area yesterday, beginning at roughly 11am and lasting until 6:30pm. After it had been restored I learned via a Facebook group for our area that it had been a planned outage, but Spark had not given advance notice of it to impacted users.

I messaged Spark via Facebook Messenger to ask why no advance notice. Agent #1 replied saying (without actually checking my account) that this is because I hadn't opted in to their 'Connection Promise' and that if I had I would have gotten a text with details about the outage and 20GB of mobile data to use for the duration of the outage.

I replied to Agent #1 explaining that I had in fact opted-in a few years ago and supplied a screenshot of my setup from MySpark. I asked her to investigate why the 'Promise' had been broken.

Agent #2 replied saying they would absolutely investigate, asking for my account details which I supplied.

Agent #3 then replied saying she had 'reset my details' and that the Connection Promise 'should' work next time.

I replied saying no... I wanted to know why it hadn't worked this time and reminded her that Agent #2 had said that she would 'absolutely' looked into it.

Agent #4 then replied saying it was likely because the mobiles I had entered into the Connection Promise setup were prepaid. She said if I wanted she could have her 'resolutions team' look at it in the morning.

At this point it was late so I let it go.

This morning I google searched for 'Connection Promise terms' and after less than 30 seconds I had verified that prepaid phones are eligible for the 'promise'.

So many questions. Obviously 'why didn't it work' is top of the list. Next is, 'why are Agents making all these assumptions without actually looking'. Then, 'why am I taking Spark's broken promise more seriously than they are?' and 'why does a different agent answer every time', followed by 'why do people even need to opt-in to this? why isn't it part of the provisioning process for everyone?'.