My affair with the yellow man - Part 1
Initially I thought I will do this post a week after I switched my telco service provider from Maxis to DiGi. However as I had too much of chinese tea during my niece's birthday dinner just now, I am still very wide awake... at 2.30 in the morning. Thank goodness it's a public holiday, else I will suffer again at work. So while waiting for the chinese tea's effect to wear down, I am going ahead to share what I think about DiGi's services... 5 days after I switched.
I know when it comes to network coverage, DiGi falls behind Celcom and Maxis. I have read from forums about how certain areas are having difficulties getting its services. I don't have much complain about that... yet. For me, what matters most is the coverage at my office and at home, the 2 locations that I spend most of my time in... and I have been getting full bar there. I may sound very naive here but I kept telling myself, their coverage shouldn't be so bad la... after all, they came out with this advert whet:
Anyhow, I love the customer service from DiGi. I tell you, I have been contacting them like hundred times since I switched and each time I got a pleasant experience. Don't get me wrong, the reason I contacted them most of the time was to find out more about their products and services; you know like what I can do with my current plan, what gets charged and what doesn't etc. They even have this chat program called D'Chat that lets you instant message their Customer Support! I remember one time I made a complain to them via this channel and before the session ends, their representative already called me to find out more information on the problem that I have just reported. I was so impressed!!
Then there is this free access *128# that you can use from your phone to check your account such as your balance, mobile services, change features etc. It's free! Can you believe that?!
I have also experimented with the Multi-Party Conferencing 
feature that came automatically with my DG50 plan. This feature allows you to connect up to 5 people to the same phone conversation. There is no registration fee but you will be charged based on your plan's rate for these calls as if they are individual calls. I haven't used this much yet but it is certainly very exciting to me.
Oh and there's the "Friends and Family" where you can add up to 6 DiGi subscribers and get much better rate when you call or text them. Sad to say though that I currently only have 2 numbers in that list as most of my friends whom I call often are in another network. Anyhow, it is still good as I never have this type of feature with my previous service provider.
Well based on my 5 days affair with DiGi, these are the good things that I have encountered. So what about the not so good ones?
For one, I think it's quite difficult to find information from their website.
For instance when I was looking for information on their value added services, I found the page but there was no link for more information about these services such as how to use them and what are the charges. When I did a search, the information that I needed was placed in the Prepaid section.
Besides that, there isn't much explanation about their call plans. I am on Postpaid DG50 plan where I need to pay a commitment fee of RM50 per month. In the website, it was stated "Usage commitment fees for DG 50 and DG 150 are inclusive of total usage for all chargeable voice and data services in the bill excluding fixed access fee and Talktime Transfer (Post to Pre) services". What about things like IDD, Roaming or Mobile Lifestyle services such as Caller Tunes? Will all these be considered as part of the commitment fee? I only found out later from forums and upon confirming with their CS that Talktime transfer and Roaming charges will not be deducted from this commitment fee. All others are included.
Aside from the website, I also have problems receiving SMSes from some Maxis numbers. I wonder whether this could be Maxis punishing me for betraying them, hehe. However these numbers did not have any problem receiving SMSes from me. Well I have reported this to DiGi and am awaiting their response.
There is also this problem where when someone from overseas calls me, I get a prefix 012 in their Caller ID. Say a friend from Singapore calls me, I will see my phone displaying the caller's number as +01265XXXXXXXX. Weird right? Feedback from DiGi's CS is that the issue is caused due to during the MNP process, the routing is done through Maxis first before it reaches DiGi. Maxis will put forth 012 as header to the number and on DiGi's side, they are unable to change this settings. I have lodged a report to Maxis. Lets see whether they will entertain me as I am no longer their customer.
All in all, I am happy with DiGi for the time being. I guess I will have to stick to the Yellow Man a while longer to know him better and to see whether this affair will be a long term one. If not, well there's always MNP (Mobile Number Portability) that I can fall back on.
(Images extracted from DiGi website and The Official Website of the Yellow Coverage Fellow!)
