Pfingo SMS is Broken
Pfingo is a service by StarHub that provides customers with an internet phone (VoIP) account, allowing affordable calls to Singapore and overseas numbers.
One huge advantage of Pfingo compared to other internet phone services is that for an additional monthly fee, you can get a local phone number tied to your account so that your family and friends in Singapore can call you locally, pay local charges, while you receive your calls anywhere on the planet.
You can send SMS from Pfingo’s Windows and mobile phone software. Well, sort of…
The major problem is that the SMS number that appears on the recipient’s end is not your local Pfingo number. We’re using Pfingo for our business to save on phone bills but instead its given us a lot of pain:
Customers who decide to respond to our SMS by calling the strange number cannot reach us
Customers who send SMS to our Pfingo number will not be successful
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We then tried to get our customers to SMS to our real mobile phone number instead. Bad move:
We got scolded by customers who were confused that the number they should call for voice calls (Pfingo) is different from the number they should SMS to (our mobile phone)
Who could possibly remember that?
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Customers who reply to the strange number must do so within a time limit
Within 30 minutes for international SMS
Within 24 hours for local SMS
Failing which, the SMS disappears into StarHub’s black hole
This is unacceptable, based on the way customers expect SMS to work (i.e. all the time)
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After a day or so, StarHub sends a meaningless SMS like this to our customers: “pfingoSMS session with [user id] has ended. Please reply to his/her mobile phone instead.”
- We got scolded by our customers for sending spam
All we wanted was a single local number on our name card, where our customers can contact us via voice or SMS. Unfortunately, it didn’t turn out that way and we signed for a 2 year contract.
Technically, StarHub has chosen a broken SMS solution using virtual SMS numbers so that they can also earn SMS revenue from Pfingo customers that do not sign up for the local phone number service. (SMS is not free on any Pfingo plan.)
A tech support article from Pfingo says the following:
A friend cannot send SMS to your pfingoTALK number directly. This is not available yet. Support for 2 Way SMS would be available in the future.
There are two issues with this:
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This limitation is not highlighted in any of the sales pages on the Pfingo site
- Customers discover this problem only after signing up for Pfingo
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StarHub seems totally uninterested in fixing this problem because that article was “created on” 2 August 2007 and was never updated since
The implications of making such a statement is that some customers may sign up for Pfingo, expecting this to be available soon
Or like us, we discovered after we signed up because we naturally expected that SMS sent to our Pfingo number would reach us
We tolerated this broken SMS problem for months, hoping that something will be done. Apparently not.
We tried contacting Pfingo’s internet-based support to get this fixed, but all we got were canned replies basically telling us “sorry but that’s how it works”
Furthermore, StarHub has restricted customer service for Pfingo to internet-based support. We went down to a few StarHub shops, asked for Pfingo, and all we got were blank stares from their customer service staff. They’ve never heard of Pfingo!
Here’s hoping that StarHub does the right thing for paying customers by implementing proper SMS, rather than amending that tech support article to remove the words “would be available in the future”. We will keep our readers up to date.
