Chime - Restricting Users from Accessing Services

Hello! I apologize for this experience you are having. As Support mentioned, there are some services that cannot be provisioned immediately on new accounts. While I can't make any promises as I'm not part of the Billing team, if you would like, please provide the case number only, as this is a public forum. I'll take a look and see if there's something else we can do and follow up here.

AWS does not provide cross account support for your security and privacy https://aws.amazon.com/premiumsupport/faqs/, so Support might not be able to use the past history of your older account to help you use this service in your new account. y

Once again, please accept my apologies and hope you have a great day ahead!

Hi Dave, could you send me an email: schuettc@amazon.com and I can try to track down the issue for you? Thanks!

I appreciate the input, Francisco_L! However, I think you're interpreting their response differently than I.

The Chime support feedback doesn't explicitly indicate this service is not available to new accounts. I think it reveals the lack of processes for proper customer training and eduction as well as a lack of guardrails to support those efforts.

I believe these growing pains all can be traced back to poor planning prior to the Chime services rollout. We all understand that AWS was trying to be responsive to the needs of the marketplace (and, of course, catch up with Zoom, Microsoft, and the other collaboration providers). Without putting anyone at Amazon/AWS on the spot, I understand that everyone on that side of the table knows Chime wasn't ready for prime time (and still has a ways to go on that development roadmap).

As I indicated in my case notes, there's nothing in the service documentation to indicate a prerequisite of "established accounts" (in any manner). Basically, we need a validated account and a method of payment; That's all the qualifiers.

AWS has been challenged with the Chime rollout. The services have been, shall we say, not used as intended which has caused a lot of service credits to be provided to customers. These customers either misconfigured or misunderstood how the services worked. Again, this accountability falls on the Chime team to address.

This leads to how the Chime team has responded to these shortcomings. Their current approach is to restrict users from accessing the services. Presumably, this is a stopgap reaction to allow them time to develop appropriate processes. No matter how you cut it, this "restriction" from allowing customer access to the service is a poor substitute for proper processes.

Additionally, subjective qualification of customers (with no established guidelines whatsoever) via a support ticket is equally inexcusable. The only metric which seems to be used in the evaluation of eligibility is the account start date. Because of this, I would understand how you can infer that we "just need to have the account longer" to qualify, but, in fact, there's no promise of this either.

In my case, I do have a qualified use case. I have an EC2 instance running my VoIP PBX application which is waiting to plug-in SIP Trunks via Voice Connectors provided by Chime. Right now, I have a PBX that has users talking to one another, but they cannot make calls via the PSTN. Again, I've provided this insight in my support ticket, but I continue to receive the same "copy-and-paste" response about continuing my AWS usage which may trigger a re-evaluation as to my readiness to access Chime. I'm sure how you can see this approach is not serving this customer.

As an additional bit of input, I had no trouble adding Chime services to my longstanding, personal user AWS account. I could provision my immediate needs and later port to this business account. It just seems like an unnecessary complication. Again, is this good for anyone?

Hello Dave, Just to follow up, I can see that the Service Team mentioned that as of January 6th, 2022 you should be able to provision a Voice Connector on your new business account! I really appreciate your patience while we worked on this and I completely understand your concerns about our policies for provisioning some services on new accounts. Hopefully this experience allows us to improve and provide a better service for our customers.

Dave thank you for this post-unfortunately the issue persists to this day. I to was faced with this error message today and joined this forum as a result. I have raised a support ticket--hopefully it will be addressed.

3/6/23

Dear Amazon Web Services team :-)

Hope you are doing well. We also are experiencing an issue with adding a SIP trunk to our Chime service. Whenever we try to add a SIP trunk, I receive an error message stating that my service has been restricted. I noticed on your forum that this may be a ramping up issue, and I wanted ask if there is anything I can do to resolve this.

If necessary, I am willing to prepay to ensure that this issue is resolved as quickly as possible. I value the services provided by Amazon Web Services and want to make sure that I am able to use them to their fullest potential.

Thank you for your time and assistance, and I look forward to hearing back from you soon.

Best regards,

Kev and Nick :-)

Case ID 12147810691