Bring a broken phone to Ting, let us pay for it

Telecom
1

Just launched this today. It's exactly what it sounds like. If you have a broken phone, get it repaired and let us pay for it, up to $150.

As always, there are details. Here is the link to the T&C, but I've also broken it down on Reddit.

New and existing Ting accounts who have never used a promo code (including referrals) are eligible. Repair a phone, submit the receipt to our team and if you qualify, your repair cost is applied in $15 monthly installments up to $150.

This does mean free service if your bill would have been <$15 anyway ($6 + $3 + tax for example) for up to 10 months depending on the cost of your repair.

Stacking with other promos is not permitted (referral codes, ETF reimbursement, etc) but you CAN stack these with referrals that you receive from others using your promo code once active. This is to prevent daisy-chaining of referrals, which is kind of against the spirit of the promo, y'know? As always we reserve the right to cancel all credits if we find fraud or misuse.

For the record, you absolutely CAN create a new Ting account if you've not had one before to take advantage of this, and you CAN create one if your old Ting account had a few promos but you've left for other (not always greener) pastures.

Our real key targets here are friends and family with a cracked screen who are overpaying one of the Big Four for service. Kill two proverbial birds with one stone by referring them to this promo.

As always, I'm available here and at mitch@ting.com for any questions, because I'm sure there will be questions.

2

There is so much that's good, with Ting, and you're such a great ambassador for the company.

I know that the $6 line charge is a cornerstone of y'all's business model and I'm sure there are great reasons for having it. Unfortunately, for me, it's the only roadblock to me having a line or two with Ting.

I still appreciate you, though!

3

I understand that. And I'd be happy to point you to the long line of now-defunct MVNOs that didn't cover their costs and now can't service their customers on a scale like we can.

That said, did you catch our Valentine's Day $6 waiver? It appears it was successful, so you should probably expect it to come back in some form or another.

We're also (hopefully) introducing some new stuff very shortly (think a few months max) that should please you as well. Fingers crossed all of our internal testing goes well!

4

Those of us who were sweet talked by Ting when rp went flat - and trusted Ting to own up to its promises...

Then only to find they had openly lied & cheated us just to get us to join up and proceeded to take away pretty much all the rewards they had promised.
Hornswoggled us - now looking to charm folks into their sticky web once again...

NO WAY says this former customer.

A company that does such things with impunity is always remembered - and ALWAYS avoided.
(As well as telling others to avoid said company at any opportunity.)

5

Speaking as a former RP customer, I got exactly what I expected to get when RP went belly-up and learned about the other side of it only after I joined ranks. I read over the details of the offer, and realized that I didn't need to join up if I didn't want to. I had been on Ting before, and knew the risks, so I jumped in to use up my RP credit.

I still can't find a documented case of Ting agents actually lying to RP customers (if you have one, please let me know) and most of the disconnect was that RP customers assumed they could stack as many referral credits as they wanted on top of Ting honoring the leftover RP balance.

It was a LOT of that, coupled with the fact that it's difficult to migrate a customer base used to getting something for nearly free into something like the Ting model. That's why we make it easy to leave -- we don't even hide your account number or PIN on your account page.

6

I did not like ting rate system. Found them expensive for my usage. I did thank them for saving my phone number.

7

I was "in the thick of it" during the RingPlus/Ting migration.

To the best of my knowledge, Ting got involved in that as a last-minute attempt to assist RingPlus customers through a necessary mass exodus that had clearly proven to be beyond the capabilities of RingPlus's infrastructure to handle successfully. It might be possible that RingPlus benefited financially from the migration, and it was without a doubt true that it was a calculated risk on Ting's part that a sufficient number of RP customers would stick around to justify the large manpower commitment (and service credits) required to make it possible.

I don't know whether the migration arrangement ended up being truly financially beneficial to either RingPlus or Ting. Personally, I believe that RingPlus was trying their best to do the right thing for their customers in a difficult situation, and that Ting was in part motivated by the same desire.

What I do know for certain is that the big winners in the arrangement were the RingPlus customers. Without Ting, or someone else who could step into the fray with similar capabilities, chances were good that most RingPlus customers would have permanently lost their phone numbers. I migrated several lines to Ting, and ported most out of Ting without paying a cent-- and received excellent customer service assistance, temporary free cell service, and absolutely no pressure to stay with Ting, during the process. For this, I will be eternally grateful.

As the whole process was under significant time pressure, Ting did revise a few statements, mostly (solely?) regarding whether referral credits could also be used and how migration credits would be applied, during the period when information was rolling out to RP customers. I know that some RP customers were dissatisfied with those revisions. To me, getting as much information/reassurance/options out to the RP refugees under a ticking clock made it worth the risk that some early information had to be revised, as full features of the migration credits were being developed/released. (And, frankly, some of that misunderstanding was due to RP customers getting and sharing information that applied to Ting customers in general, and not specifically to those migrating from RP..)

8

Agreed -- Ting was truly a life (er, line) saver! They might not have pleased everyone, but their proactive assistance certainly averted another major MVNO disaster.

9

We were under no delusion that most of RP's customers would stick around. They claimed to have something like 100,000 and we realistically expected to convert 5-7% of that. Because again, it's REALLY hard to convert a base who is used to bargain-basement pricing to the Ting model.

I get it. We're a punching bag. Our $6 line fee is apparently the scourge of the MVNO world, despite us still regularly saving customers gobs of money over the Big Four, still being stupidly simple to explain, and the business continuing to grow. But we're probably one of the few companies that could afford to extend the sinking-ship RP customers anything resembling a lifeboat. The way I saw it as an RP customer living through the transition is that lifeboat Ting offered didn't come with a free meal that they were promised on the ship, so a lot of that anger that probably should have been directed at Karl and RP got directed at us under a very short RP-to-Ting timeframe.

I'm not really here to re-legislate RingPlus in the court of public opinion, because we're way past that now. We had a similar process for when TPO ceased providing service to their customers in the states. And we want to be around to be the no-strings lifeboat for any other MVNO whose other alternative is losing their customers' top-ups and phone numbers permanently. Literally nobody wants that.

10

Ting have come up with some interesting promos over the years but this one is very odd. Are people really taking advantage of this? Seems unlikely to me.

I appreciate it that ting was there to transition to from ringplus. I am sure it helped a lot of people out of a jam. There was plenty of time to port out before moving over to Ting though so I had left long before the migration. It seemed pretty generous at first but it didn't appeal since it wasn't that much more than the usual referral credit for me. I recall some complaints about multiple account credits not stacking, referrals not stacking etc etc and people were expecting a little too much from Ting in my opinion. A lot of that simply came from the anger at losing service and money with ringplus.

I've been following Ting since the early days and I have come close to signing up a few times but haven't done so yet. One of these days you'll get me with one of your promos. Keep trying lol.

11

It always astounds me to see how quickly & easily bad corporate behaviours are excused, denied & forgotten.

We were not the only customers who were severely disappointed after falling for the sign-on bonuses & such.
The promised amounts appeared in our accounts, lingered for a while, then were silently removed.
There was a bit of an uproar in the forum(s) around that time as others had been equally disappointed.

Using the support/chat function brought solid proof that the company knowingly allowed, then removed the sign-on bonuses - and yes, someplace in my email archives I do have the transcripts of said chats.
Will I dig those up & share them ??
Not worth the bother IMO - lesson learned - no chance of a recurrence here - and others seem to have forgotten their disappointments already - so it would not be of any help to anyone anyhow.

Ultimately:
We ended up paying for a short time for services that should have been 100% covered for a longer time - only long enough to port our numbers to a better provider (with no mandatory per-line fees) and have been much more content with that ever since. (2-3 years ??)

I suspect that many of the similarly disappointed rp refugees were never heard from because they simply decided to get away from using any/all MVNOs permanently to avoid any more similarly nasty shocks.

12

Sincere thanks for saying what I was thinking.
I hope LiterallyUnlimited does not take it personally as he is a really GOOD Guy.
I was pretty vocal in the RingPlus refugee days as to warn about Ting's habit of arbitrarily voiding or not honoring credits. I pretty much got abused for warning people then got (almost) no pleasure in saying "I Told You so" when my warnings came to pass. I was speaking from experience as I got quite a lot of people to sign up years ago then had egg on my face when they got ripped off by Ting. I understand their business model with the monthly fees and the "buckets" but currently that model is simply not competitive at any usage level and frankly even if all their staff is as awesome as LiterallyUnlimited is - how often do you really need customer support?

13

I want to be 100% absolutely crystal clear here.

The R+ balance matching we did was as a service to R+ customers. We did not get any money from R+ for doing it, so it was more a gesture of goodwill. Karl left with your top-ups, as best I can tell.

Our terms of service pretty explicitly did and do say:
The spirit of the program is one-to-one referral. Buying Ting-branded keywords, spamming coupon sites, employing SEO tactics, selling a referral URL and so on are smart ideas but are not consistent with the spirit of the program. These things and others like them will be considered abuse. For this reason we reserve the right to cancel a referral code or codes at any time. We also reserve the right to rescind credits that were previously issued if we determine that the program has been abused.

The only credits that were ever rescinded were based on our human (no robots) security team determining someone trying to game our system with multiple accounts or stacking credits they would not otherwise be eligible for. We didn't rescind credits for anyone trying to play by the rules. Voiding was not arbitrary by any stretch of the imagination.

I'm living proof of this. I had $35 in R+ top-up credit and was not a Ting customer or employee at the time of the switch. I took the terms of the deal offered to me, knew pretty well I was only getting those credits based on the timeline laid out and went about my way.

But I guess we could argue back and forth about this all day. I understand those of you for whom this will forever tarnish the Ting name. That's okay! That's why we love our competition. I'd rather not re-legislate the ins and outs of saving R+ phone numbers.

They are. It's not designed to be a rush in of new customers. It's designed to trigger the memories of former Ting customers with a broken iPhone in the drawer who need a phone for their 9-year-old. Or their mom who has a bad charging port on her Samsung and is overpaying AT&T. Not that I speak from experience, anyway.

I view this as a personal challenge. We've just gotten approval to take pre-orders for another promo. If you're interested, let me know. It should go wide the first week of April.

Oh, I hope not. We set out only to save their numbers and give them an option to jump on to the Ting model, or port literally anywhere else without losing the phone number. We view a customer losing the phone number as almost worse than losing their carrier as an option.

When your carrier is going under? Seems pretty important. :slight_smile:

14

Just a personal observation: I'm currently a Ting customer, most likely not for the long haul-- and I've been a Ting customer several relatively short periods in the past, beyond the Ring-to-Ting transition period. (And I help a family that has been with Ting since R+ failed.)

Even as a relatively savvy MVNO user, I've used Ting's customer service when I've had Ting accounts, and was glad it was available. More than that, the access to Ting's freely available knowledge base has helped make me a savvy MVNO user, even when I've not been a TING customer. I think it's valid to say that MVNO users in general benefit from Ting's Customer Service, even if most have never been a TING customer. (Seriously-- how many times have forums recommended using TING's MEID/MEI validation tool, their Sprint ICCID database, linked to a knowledge-base article, etc.?)

Bottom line, I'm glad that Ting has managed to build a stable customer base that makes that type of information sharing available to all of us, customers or not. It seems that TING must be doing a good job of attracting (and aiming promos at) users that are comfortable with their pricing structure. Steady sustainable growth, and attracting stable long-term customers, may be a better business model than doing whatever it takes to attract price-conscious customers & dealing with the higher churn.

15

Although I thank them for saving my number. I found their pricing structure too high for my usage so I left.

16

Never had a problem with Ting. They provided the service and credits under the conditions they set forth. Seems the ones that express an issue were the ones not able to get away with abusing their terms.

That word seems to be a hot topic lately.

17

Nth circlers are passionate about bargain hunting, stacking bonuses, etc. We are not representative of the general population.

I put several family/friends on the Sprint free year promo more than 1 year ago and most remain with Sprint paying $60/month. None of them can be bothered to do roundtrip porting to get another free year. They prefer to "set it and forget it." I'm sure based on actual usage, some of them could save money and would be good candidates for Ting.

18

I had straight forward, problem-free, experience with Ting. Service is quick, timely, and accurate. I used Ting GSM as a hideout between my Sprint 1 year free signups. :slight_smile:

19

Good for you, I for one have never "abused" anyone.
I was explaining MY experience and those of friends and family that experienced the same.
It is very presumptuous and dismissive to assume no one on the planet can have a differing opinion or experience or motivation than your own.
Also just for the record I was commenting about an experience that predated the R+ refugee situation by years as was explicitly stated in my post.

20

Therein lies the rub:

And the words 'broken phone' bring 'broken promises' directly to mind !!
For us, they credited the promised sign-on bonuses - then soon thereafter those were subtracted silently, with neither notice nor complaint by the company & only seen by me because I was nervous about this changeover & checked the account every few days.

Abused their terms ??
Too funny.
Given that we had gigantic allotments with rp, and actually use maybe 200 minutes/month, 20-30 SMS & ZERO data - if that small usage qualifies as abuse I'd be very surprised.

Sure, we 'saved' our numbers from rp via Ting & that was a help to us - until things were exposed as NOT being kosher with Ting - then it was time to try and get answers (which failed) - so we bailed out ASAP.

Since then we've had truly flawless services with their direct competitor - at lower costs - with all promises kept - and clear answers on the unusual occasion that we needed to up the service level for a short time.

If/when ANY company makes an offer - and I accept that & sign on - only to find soon thereafter that they 'changed their mind' & withdrew the benefits I signed on to get...
That company goes on my BAD list - forever - and will not be trusted again - period.

This is why I bothered to post here at all - Ting is forever on my BAD list - and this is why.

If others find such behaviours acceptable and/or tolerable - good for them; and for those lucky ones who didn't have their benefits yanked for no apparent reason, fantastic - congrats.

These discussion boards are the best (only ??) places where folks can either express their loyalties or antipathies due to their experiences - for others to see in case that may be helpful for said others.

In this situation there are clearly folks who have been very happy with this company, and others who have not been happy - it is for the individual to decide what their own loyalties & trusts shall be.