Chaos of Mother’s Day sale investigated by Taiwan’s regulator

Taiwan’s National Communications Commission (NCC) is to decide how to penalise Chunghwa Telecom for chaos caused by a low-cost service plan sale that took place over 7 days, reports the Taipei Times. The nation’s largest telecoms operator started offering four low-cost mobile plans ranging from NT$299 to NT$599 per month. To compete, Taiwan Mobile and Far EasTone Telecommunications also began offering low-cost plans. “However, most consumer complaints were directed at Chunghwa Telecom for long wait times at its stores nationwide, busy customer service lines and exclusion of existing subscribers.” Chunghwa Telecom has said that the plans were introduced to celebrate Mother’s Day and refused to extend the availability of the offers and would complete the remaining application procedures by 31 May. The NCC has requested that the three major operators give briefings on how they executed their sales – commission spokesperson Wong Po-tsung said: “We want to know if they planned to streamline the application procedures and whether their retail stores were prepared to handle a large number of applications within a short period of time. Meanwhile, we will investigate whether they thoroughly disclosed the information in advance so that consumers would know the differences between service plans. Before the plans were launched, these operators should have expected to respond to mounting consumer complaints and ensured that they would not overwork their employees.” The commission also expects to learn whether the special offers have led to significant changes in the number of subscribers among the major telecoms players, or whether they motivated subscribers who used to pay higher monthly fees to switch to low-cost plans, he said. Chunghwa Telecom is estimated to have handled about 1 million applications during the 7-day sale. https://bit.ly/2L4osNz

• Monday, 21 May 2018