Round and Round We Go

The catapult systems on aircraft carriers can propel a 45,000 pound plane from 0 to 165 mph in two seconds. Pretty dang impressive. Apparently many ISPs studied this amazing feat when building their own plans for customer expulsion.

I’ve been a customer of my current service provider for nearly 12 months now. That can only mean that we’re about to end our relationship. See they now want to charge me almost $30 more a month for the privilege of using their valuable service. Do they really think that after dealing with their unreliable phone service and less than stellar support they can increase my rates and keep my business? Seriously, who comes up with these plans? Let’s give new customers a solid introductory price and then jack up the rates once they learn how awful we are to deal with because they certainly won’t be able to find another service more unfriendly and incompetent than we are. Is there a hidden prize for turn over rates? Is this some kind ego thing that is beyond my simple minded comprehension? “We had another stellar year, we brought in 3 million new customers while jettisoning 98% of our existing customer base. It’s key that we remove all stale users before they contaminate us.”

I even called my current provider and said:

“I’ve been very frustrated with your phone service as it’s been down several times a month almost every month for a year. But the last month has been better so what kind of price will you give me to retain me as a customer?”

The reply of course was that they cannot offer any promotions to existing customers. You know because money from existing customers isn’t nearly as valuable as money from potential customers. I even explained that I can switch to either of their main competitors without any installation fees and get a lower monthly price guaranteed for 12 months. Still nothing they can do about it.

So we’ll be switching services next week. Already the new service isn’t doing any better. They offer the triple play: Internet, phone, and tv. I signed up for all three after verifying that I could drop the tv and not affect my 12 month rate. We don’t normally watch enough tv to justify the cost, but the Jazz could have a good run through the playoffs so I figured I’d try it for at least a month or two. But later they called and indicated that dropping the tv would result in a $75 fee. Again, let me get this straight. I’m willing to pay money for tv service for a least a couple of months, but they’d rather just not have my money at all than have to deal with the extreme pain of deactivating my tv?

It’s not really shocking to hear about the financial pains the network is going through. I expect at the current rate of things the merry-go-round will be spinning indefinitely.