Here’s one thing you should know before subscribing to Celcom Postpaid

Celcom offers one of the best value for money postpaid plans with its Free Video Walla offering. If you sign up for its Celcom Gold Plus (RM98/month) and above, the plan comes with extra 100GB of Super Video Walla. Unfortunately, it appears that many subscribers are not aware that it is a time-limited promo as it isn’t clearly stated on its website.

In case you didn’t know, Video Walla is a special video streaming quota which you can use on 15 platforms including YouTube, Netflix, Viu, iFlix and Astro Go. When the new postpaid and family plans were introduced in the past year, Video Walla was clearly offered for the first 12 months for new subscribers. On the previous website design, the 12-month term was indicated on the postpaid plan table as shown in an old screenshot below:

If you check out Celcom’s current website, the postpaid plan page states that there’s free 30GB of Video Walla for its Gold Postpaid Plan and 100GB Super Video Walla for Gold Plus, Gold Supreme, Platinum and Platinum Plus.

As seen above, the Free Video Walla offering is listed like a perpetual benefit similar to the normal data quota and unlimited calls. There’s no attached asterisk or symbols to indicate that Free Video Walla is a promo deal. It’s also the same situation for its family plans that come with 1TB of shareable video walla.

The issue here is that Celcom is not being very transparent and the only way to know that there’s a 12-month term is by digging through a specific FAQ and T&C. With Video Walla being a key highlight for the postpaid plan, Celcom should be more upfront about it by stating it on the product pages itself.

This tactic of burying important terms under the terms & conditions is the reason why consumers don’t trust telcos when it comes to marketing messages. Why hide something that was previously communicated clearly?

Amin had recently ported his primary and family lines from Maxis to Celcom, and he also wasn’t aware that there’s a 12-month time period for the 1TB Video Walla promo. He did his research online and nobody at the Celcom outlet had explained to him that the free video data is only applicable for the first 12 months.

Celcom needs to be more transparent

If Celcom can highlight its current online rebate promo by stating RM10 x 6 months and RM10 x 12 months on the postpaid table, there’s no reason why they can’t do the same for Video Walla. We hope that Celcom will update their materials properly as this can be very misleading for potential customers. At the moment, you can find a barrage of complaints on Twitter when the telco abruptly discontinued video walla for some existing users.

As mentioned earlier, if the promo is still available for new signups, why not extend it for loyal users? Or at least, make it easier for existing users with good payment history to extend their Free Video Walla benefit. If you’re an existing Celcom customer, you could probably “renew” your Video Walla offer by switching to prepaid and then switching back again to Celcom postpaid as a “new” subscriber. Of course, this is only possible if you don’t have any existing contract.

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