Cox did this with my dad, fucked around and found out. To this day, if you bring up Cox Cable, my dad goes, “OH, you mean the company I was a loyal customer to for 32 years, 10 months, and 17 days?!”

He had one of those cable-internet-landline bundles and was paying something like $150/month for it, something about he just had to call every renewal or something like that. Well, him and my mom fell on some hard times and forgot/missed a payment/something happened with Cox.

My dad gets the bill the next month, and it says his package is now $300/month (or something ridiculous like that). He calls Cox and wants to know what’s up, why his bill doubled in a month, etc They told him he missed his renewal and thus his promotional price was lost, and now he’s got to do the regular price. He explains what’s been going on and how they’re doing their best, they want to remain a customer, but they’re not paying $300/month for something they were paying $150/month for.

Cox refused to budge, offering a like $25/month discount at best. So my dad goes, “So, I just want to understand… If I was a new customer creating a new account, you’d give me my old rate? And if I hadn’t missed the thing last month, you’d give me my old rate?” Correct. “So my being a customer of yours for over 32 years… That gets me nothing?!” That’s correct, Sir, so would you like to renew, make any changes, or make a payment?

“Oh, you can close the account, I’ll be dropping off your equipment in about 3 hours, thank you.” And they still argued with my dad, I think they moved up to $50/month discount, and he just told them to kick rocks, he would rather have no internet, cable, or telephone, than give Cox his money ever again. And to this day, he refuses to recommend Cox to anyone, and tells them to check his file whenever they call or come to the door trying to get him to come back.

This reminds me of the people you see in stores who are trying to sell you on a phone plan. I have mint mobile and pay like $15 a month for my plan which has more than enough data. They asked how much I currently pay and I told them it and they just immediately gave up and were like yeah we can’t match that.

They’ve got a deal that’s three years for $99 but you have to really push them to offer it to you. They say it’s for new customers only but it really isn’t.

And then you lose any loyalty or banked credits because it’s technically a “New contract”

I had 100GB of data credit in my pre paid phone plan. I got 2GB a month for $5 unlimited talk and text starting in 2014, it’s a good deal for me. And you can imagine how long it took to bank 100GB even with the occasional free bonus data promo… That plan was replaced with a more expensive one but somehow I got grandfathered in to the cheap plan.

So naturally I didn’t want to rock the boat when I was getting my phone for $5 a month (their cheapest plan now is $20)

But they finally caught on and moved me to the $20 this year, they automatically transferred my data bank and sent me the new terms.

I double checked and while this was their cheapest monthly plan the 6 month plan would save me $80 in the long term so I called to get swapped and they said that I’d lose my data bank because it was a new contract. I argued that they changed my contract and I should have had an opportunity to choose which new contract my data gets transferred to.

I spent ages debating it, but there was nothing the rep or their supervisor could do to reward my 10 years with their company or compensate me for the service I had pre paid for (data) that they now expected me to subscribe to on their new terms to be able to access despite the contract I signed saying something totally different.

Their leading budget competitor had the exact same overall rate but for a yearly pre paid plan, and new customers got a 150GB data bank start up bonus. So my phone bill is paid up for the year now and I’ve still got a decent chunk of data and it didn’t cost more than I was prepared to pay the old company.

(and yes I do use it, I’m a substitute teacher so I’m always using my phone as a hot spot when I’m at a different school)

You really just have to threaten them with switching in my experience. Then you can often get the same discounts.

I think it’s designed that way because Sales VP’s get bonuses based on new sales, not retention.

So there is an unspoken market force that causes service companies to churn customers. Senior executives want you to leave because the competition is doing the same thing.

All competing companies sales teams benefit from churn as long as all companies work to alienate their customers and make them switch services.

When I ran an isp I had a customer complaint about new sales being cheaper than loyal customers get forwarded to me. I realized my mistake and cut prices across the board so loyal customers paid the same as new promotions. But very large companies are an old boys club. The CEO isn’t going to piss off his VP of sales so the game goes on.

At least with telecoms speeds are fast enough now (in my area)that it just doesn’t matter which provider I use so I always go with the discount guys now and its great.

Profit graph needs to go up or stakeholders get mad.

same with employees

It costs more, but those are indirect costs associated with marketing. Most executives only look at sales and expenses and don’t think in indirect costs, regardless of how many business people try to explain. So the costs are marketing, we either cut the costs or we cut the budget, but not change what we are doing. Or they don’t care, because of the above collusion mentioned in another comment, or because they want to spend on marketing for their golf buddy, the marketing CEO.

Does it drive me insane, as someone who has a marketing and accounting degree, and had to explain it a bunch of times? Yes. Also most high level executives make up a fantasy version of how the business is being run and feel anyone who doesn’t agree is inherently wrong.

Hello, I would like 25 grams of data please!