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The Welcome to Ireland SMS message still lands about 25minutes or so after my phone has landed on the Irish cellular network every time I visit my older daughter a couple of miles up the road...
The joys of rural living 🤣
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Have you glanced at the VMO2 response, in the Ofcom link above?
This is how it goes... And RTFM, or RTSMS, is so often ignored by customers, as is reading what they sign up to with VMO2, it seems 🤷🤦
Annex 1
Question 1: Do you agree with our proposals to introduce rules and accompanying guidance requiring providers to send customers roaming alerts that include information on roaming charges, mobile bill limits and where to access more information?
VMO2 supports the introduction of rules and accompanying guidance, to ensure the consistency of information across industry for customers who are roaming. As a general point, for Ofcom’s consideration, VMO2 has found that the longer the notification message, the less likely customers will respond to, or indeed heed, the information contained within it. If there are too many calls to action or too much information contained within the notification, its impact is diminished.
Opt-out functionality
VMO2 questions the necessity of the opt-out functionality, and more specifically the ease of the customer being able to opt-out of these crucial notifications. VMO2 considers that making the optout functionality via a text back process, allows customers to opt-out of these important notifications too easily, without necessarily thinking about the consequences, in full. Furthermore, it seeks to undermine the importance of the content by advertising the opt-out functionality within the body of the message.
Should a customer exercise the opt-out facility, VMO2 does not consider that this risk is mitigated by sending a message once a year, during peak travelling periods, to remind the customer that they are opted out of notifications. It is counter intuitive to send a message to customers, who have chosen to not receive messages, about messages that they may or may not wish to receive, providers may as well just send the relevant notification. This is particularly relevant in light of Ofcom’s own research highlighted in paragraph 3.11 of the consultation document.
There is a stronger argument to send a roaming message containing important and relevant information, the customer can ultimately choose to read it or not. Customers travel throughout the year, not only for leisure, therefore, being able to pre-empt the most useful time of year for all customers is virtually impossible.
Furthermore, it’s largely impossible to establish whether customers are inadvertently roaming or actually roaming, therefore roaming notifications are appropriate to be sent. Unless we have their home address as registered as living near a border, and we can exempt them from permanent roaming.
Modern smartphones can block or mute specific numbers, so if the point is that customers are inconvenienced by receiving these messages and no longer wish to receive them, they can selfmanage with ease.
In addition, there is a likelihood of an increase in calls to customer services querying roaming charges, from customers who would have forgotten they had opted out of the notifications and would otherwise have been informed of potential charges being incurred. The notification would have served as a prompt to take necessary action, to avoid these charges altogether.
Irrespective of whether providers still offer roam like at home, this does not mitigate rest of roaming charges, where a customer may be going from an EU country to a non-EU country on a work trip or carrying out a multi-country holiday, where they may experience different rates at different times during their trip.
Allowing business (microenterprise) customers to opt-out of roaming notifications, may not be appropriate if they are an employee and not the account holder. The account holder may wish for their employees to receive the notifications to enable them to be mindful of any additional charges that the business may incur. Additionally, it may prompt them employee to contact the account holder to take necessary action to add a roaming bolt-on or Spend Cap, to reduce rest of world roaming charges.
etc....
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