In some ways it’s just as well to occasionally get a reminder that loyalty to a brand is a fundamentally bullshit concept in the first place.
you can pry my brand from my cold, dead, probably delicious hands.
This is literally why I’ve quit and re-joined my job 2 times now. They won’t give me a competitive salary, competitive salary is given only to newcomers, so I occasionally must become a newcomer
I worked at a place that would give at most a 10% raise. That number was virtually impossible to get. We had so many developers that just wanted competitive pay or something close. So many quit, resulting in 1of 2 scenarios:
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We rehired the developer a few months later at 2x the salary. This cuased months of delays and expenses to their projects.
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We hired a replacement dev with less experience at 2x the salary. This costs months of time to ramp up.
Both scenarios pissed off our clients and resulted in lost sales.
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This is really infuriating, in Canada this is terrible, like new customer can have their cell plan or internet or whatever at let’s say 35$/month while you are a customer for 20 years and the best they can do is 80$/month.
Funny enough you can port your phone/service to another carrier and the next day the original carrier calls you for a “winback” at 35$/month, silly.
My partner and I change our cell plan over year for this reason, pretty much like clockwork.
I’ve successfully refinanced my internet plan once here in Mexico. I called up asking what that was all about, and the rep said “aight, you want it, you got it”, even though I hadn’t even asked. Shout out to that one rep.
But then my MVP company got acquired by a bigger one, and they started increasing my internet bill every month without my consent, so I had to jump ship to an even bigger company. They seem to be behaving for now.
It’s such a hit-or-miss sometimes. I don’t get it.
Ah, at first I was thinking “maybe they charge long time users that much so they don’t have to charge new users as much” but no — just greed.
They do it because they’re banking on elderly people to not know what they’re paying and lazy/oblivious people not to care. A long time ago, I would help older people with various things. Sometimes I’d play music for them or just listen to their stories. One thing I realized is that so many “legitimate” businesses exist simply because they’re scamming elderly people. I even worked for a PC repair shop for a few years. You can guess who 90 percent of our clientele was. We’d sell really shitty refurbished PCs to them for nearly a thousand dollars. They’d force me to try to make them trade in their PC regardless of the issue so we can part out their good parts and sell them some bare bones piece of shit. I felt so scummy while I worked there. It’s really gross how much of our economy is based on scams.
Same with my ISP. After the initial 2-year “promo” pricing, you have to call every year to threaten them that you are switching so they give a discount again.
My explanation for this is the sales department only gets bonuses for new customers. So they have an incentive to get you to quit because the Sales Department at other companies also get bonuses on new sales.
It’s game theory. The opponent sales departments get the biggest reward by being the worst business as long as their competitors are also bad. If you don’t switch back and forth every other year, they don’t get a bonus.
I think Koodo is the best about this, felt like every time I checked their plan offerings my price went down.
I’ve been with Fizz for a few years, and both my phone and home internet plans have both dropped in price over the years, plus they give you “perks” like more data or a small discount that you can apply to your plans. I’m at $7 off my monthly payment at this point.
In the end, we’re still dealing with the big guys, but at least for now, these subsidiaries are acting much nicer than their parent companies.
Same thing in Serbia… They are using the same system everywhere…
Just start the paperwork for switching providers. They’ll call You back and give You exactly what You want. I’ve done that 3 times already with my phone/internet provider.
This happened to me a couple of times. I quit the service and suddenly it became cheaper. It’s a nice trick, but i’m so annoyed that i always quit out of principle
Be prepared to follow through as well; I’ve had the retention department not match the other offer, so just cancelled and moved on.
That fine and dandy with cellphone provider. I Don’t have choices for internet so they can call my bluff there.
Have you tried bluffing even harder? Say that you got some good introductory offer for a satellite provider, or that you’re going to use your cellphone’s data as your primary internet connection for example?
I have a 2 year agreement with my home Internet for a lower price. It’s not a contract because I can leave at any time, but I get a deal for a cheaper plan. It’s up in a few months, and all the options available for me to switch to are way higher. I’m going to call and try to pull the “well give me the new customer deal” shit, and if they call my bluff that they’re the only option I’ll just go without home Internet for a month or two then try to sign up again as a new customer and hope it works. I have unlimited hotspotting on my phone, it’s super slow but I can make do for a bit if I have to.
Unfortunately I work from home, and must be directly connected to the internet modem. No wifi and must be ground internet no satellite or wireless internet.
While yes, that is the necessary thing to do it is absolutely bullshit that we need to do extra work to not be overcharged.
My parents will alternate whos name the bill is in every 2 years so it looks like a new customer even though the direct debit is the same account.
Yoooo! That’s us! The first year they try to work with us. The second year they tell us to pound sand so we give the people at the closest store a new customer signup. We only have Comcast so we swap back and forth on who is the account holder.
Ah yes, the Cox Communications model.
In Italy it is often done that newcomer deals are given when you insist or threaten to leave. Sometimes without even that, and some will just unregister you and register you back to get those offers by just asking.
In Brazil there is a law that requires companies to offer those deals to current customers too. They still often try to deny giving us those deals but nothing a quick complaint in the governments site can’t fix
In my country, when we still had most shops and services coming from small businesses, it was common to receive discounts and benefits for being a long-time customer, and in december, almost all shops gave small gifts to their customers. But then, the multinational corporations came with full force and people embraced them… no need to tell how this ended
That’s because small businesses know there’s half a dozen competitors within a 20 minute drive and care about keeping your business.
When there’s two huge corporations that own the market between them, there’s more profit in not competing than they’d get by trying to win customers from each other.
Indeed, and also because those small shops were often owned by families or had less abstraction layers that remove all traces of humanity, like in the big corps
Didn’t work for me with Verizon. They do not care. They want you to quit. Comcast wants you to quit too. By switching between providers every year, the Sales Executives of competing companies get to show big numbers of new customers and get a bigger bonus.
Just stop subscribing to the big three carriers (in the US) and go with a reseller! I’ve been with StraightTalk for almost a decade now and my bill has been a consistent $35 (plus a few bucks in taxes/fees) the entire time AND the data allowance at full speed has gone UP over time.
Or sometimes just find alternatives that suits your needs.
I’m with Tello and I pay $15 a month for 5GB/Unlimited Text-Talk, but it suits my needs. They’re having a cool deal right now for Black Friday where it’s $15 for unlimited data with text/talk for an entire year. The only fees is a few cents for tax.
Yep, 10 years with a reseller. I have 5 lines now and my bill is $150/month. I always purchase unlocked phones so I have the option of swapping whenever I want. I only run midrange phones and run them for 3+ years. I also pay for cable internet for another $80/month. Can’t wait until the fiber company finally gets around to installing in my neighborhood. That will cut that bill down by 1/2.
Does anyone why this is a thing?
Apart from the obvious capitalist greed, what’s the point if everyone leaves and then re-enters with the discount?
Is it just a way to milk the laziest ones? Or even worst, the elderly?
It would be so fucking stupid but I can’t really think of anything else, so if anyone has some knowledge that wants to share I am all ears.
EDIT: thank you to everyone who answered, it makes more sense now and I’m glad I’ve never been a “loyal customer” in my entire life.
That’s just how subscription models work.
Lure, hook, boil.
Lure new customers, hook them with convenience and dependency, boil them with slowly increasing prices so they don’t notice they are being skinned alive for all they are worth while the service quality decreases. It has been like this since time immemorial and it is the only reason that first month, first time user promotions exists.
In the cell phone carrier industry, it’s called churn. Getting new customers is considered better than keeping old customers, especially when older customers are grandfathered into better plans.
The big three carriers in the US are running a scam. It’s only worth paying for them if they are subsidising your phone. Once they’re no longer doing that, you should drop them and go to one of the other two. They all have roughly comparable coverage, though it depends on where you live. (If you say they don’t/one is best, either you live in an odd place and maybe that’s valid; or, you’re a victim of deceptive marketing.) By changing carriers, you become a new customer and you can get the deal. But people are too lazy to change, so they keep paying the high price.
If you don’t want to change network, at least change from the network to their MVNO (Mobile Virtual Network Operator). Verizon’s is called Visible. T-Mobile’s is called Mint. I do not know if AT&T owns one. There is one called US Mobile that lets you jump between operators, which are called Dark Star (AT&T, a reference to their logo resembling the Death Star from Star Wars), and I’m not sure which is which between the other two. They’ll let you change carriers for a buck or two, or there’s a more expensive plan where you can do it for free. You may have even heard of Trump Mobile. While that hasn’t officially started, as much as we want to shit on it (and rightly so), it’s just gonna be another MVNO. What makes it stand out is, one, it’s named after a president, and two, it’s a lot more expensive than the others at $47.45 a month. Most MVNOs are like $20-30 a month. Two lines on T-Mobile was running us like $200 a month. Now we pay Visible $25 each. There’s no family plan, everyone pays individually, but we’re paying a quarter as much and we have Verizon coverage, which is wider where we live, but not as fast as T-Mo. T-Mo is fast if you can get it but they don’t have the square miles of the bigger two, even after acquiring Sprint and US Cellular.
my guess would be that those loyal customers are the least likely to leave, so u can squeeze as much as u like out of them.
new customers u wanna attract more of, so treat them better and they will come to u.
those who leave and come back for the discount are probably not a meaningful enough size for a company to even think about.
Or even worst, the elderly?
id say this is definitely an effect of this behaviour, but i doubt its intentional. a company doesnt care abt anything but profits, so they dont care abt the impact of their actions beyond that
They feel no reason to appeal to you when they count you as a committed customer making it more likely they up charge you if possible all about that money.
