Jack Bennest wrote:Now back to the original idea - companies offering freebies to keep customers from straying.
My apologies for going a little off topic there
One thing that annoys me about this behavior is this mindset: "if you could give me something free or discounted in the first place, why didn't you!?"
I understand the logic behind it, but for example, Sirius offered me two months free when I threatened to quit, so I took them up on it, before the two months were up I called to cancel again and they said "can we offer you two free months to see if you'll change your mind?". How long would they have kept that up!? The service was unusable (I talked about that in another post) but still, if they can afford to just give me the service free for 4 months or more, why not just make the monthly fee less than $10 a month? It works out to the same and maybe more people would subscribe at $9.99/month.
I've experienced the same with Bell before too, I was going to quit because I was angry about all the price increases they'd pushed through at the time (within two years my bill went from $75 a month to $95 a month for TV). And this was before the "TV Tax". So, they offered me 10% off my bill or something, and the same thought occurred... if you can afford to give me 10% off, why are you JUST offering me that now? If I was "such a loyal customer they hated to lose", They would have had a better chance of keeping me if I had just received a letter one month saying "we value you so much as a customer, here's a permanent discount on your rate", not "we don't have the same TV channels packaged together that you signed up for 3 years ago, so in order for you to keep it the way it is, you have to pay an extra $10".
I've never heard of a company giving away a free phone AND free service for a year. I've heard of companies giving away free phones and I've heard of companies offering a free "upgrade" once you've been with them for several years, but never just "here's free everything for a year, we'll talk to you in 12 months". Then again I've also never heard of a $5.26/month plan for Internet and phone with no strings attached once the year is done.