Phone Freebies

Phone Freebies

Postby Jack Bennest » Sat Oct 02, 2010 1:49 pm

There is most likely a thread somewhere on here about the competitive marketplace for phone bundles ( including cable, tv, internet )

I just received a phone call from Eastlink - my internet and cable company. They were offering free phone
for a year - no obligation.

I said no because I get free phone and internet from Telus - actually the monthly bill is $5.26. Yes thats a one year freebie
but Telus will have to offer me something special next year or I am going to a cell phone with Bell or some other fine deal.

What is going on? Well I guess de-regulation is doing us a favour by lowering prices and each company wants a loyal fan
base to make some money, pay the employees etc.

Can we compare our experiences? Wouldn't this be nice if food sales were treated like this? How about gas price wars, they are are a lot of fun. :sad5:
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Re: Phone Freebies

Postby jon » Sat Oct 02, 2010 2:07 pm

This is all driven by a commonly held belief on the marketing side of the Telco/Cable industry that says the Holy Grail is the Triple Slam or whatever they call it. They are even talking about Quad Slams now.

Concept is that it is worth almost any price to win a customer who will buy 3 or 4 things from you. Cable TV, Home Phone and Broadband "high speed" Internet were the original trio. Cell phone service has been added to make it four. HDTV services and long distance arguably raise that number to Six.

The other piece of this is the belief that once they have you, you are theirs for good. And they are probably right for the vast majority of their customers, as it is a hassle to change. I haven't seen the stats on cell phones, though, as young people spend the most and also have the highest "Churn Rate" -- willingness to change providers.

Freebies for the short term are interesting, but I concentrate my attention to the long term savings. So-called Bundles generally offer significant savings when you buy multiple services from the same provider rather than one each from several providers.

All that said, when TELUS introduced OPTIK a few months back, they were offering a full year at $10/service for home phone, HD cable TV, and supposedly optical fibre-based Internet sevice.
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Re: Phone Freebies

Postby Buckley » Sun Oct 03, 2010 9:48 am

jon wrote:I haven't seen the stats on cell phones, though, as young people spend the most and also have the highest "Churn Rate" -- willingness to change providers.


The young people I know who switch so often do so because they couldn't afford their bill at the end of a month after being on Facebook for a few hours and sending a few thousands texts to their other clearly illiterate friends... so they have to switch providers because they get cut off from the one and need to spend $50 or whatever it is to get re-connected.
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Re: Phone Freebies

Postby hagopian » Sun Oct 03, 2010 1:53 pm

....and the credit rating goes to about 320 - and so the dunderheads are starting their fiscal life behind the proverbial eight ball.

Smooth. :nonono:
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Re: Phone Freebies

Postby Buckley » Sun Oct 03, 2010 10:30 pm

hagopian wrote:....and the credit rating goes to about 320 - and so the dunderheads are starting their fiscal life behind the proverbial eight ball.

Smooth. :nonono:


People accuse me of giving young people (and I'm not that old myself) far less credit than they deserve. These same people really believe that the 21 and under population in this country are intelligent individuals, capable of being contributing members of society. Well let me tell you, I went back to school as a (semi)mature student, I spent hours with this group, and they are morons. I give them too MUCH credit if anything by saying that. It's astounding to me that they can dress themselves daily, never mind choosing a cell phone plan that fits their lifestyle, sticking to the terms of it without taking on a large amount of overage fees, and remembering to pay the bill each month.
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Re: Phone Freebies

Postby Jack Bennest » Mon Oct 04, 2010 6:22 am

Now back to the original idea - companies offering freebies to keep customers from straying.
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Re: Phone Freebies

Postby jon » Mon Oct 04, 2010 7:53 am

My mother just got a free month followed by 30% off the following months of the Edmonton Journal. Not by threatening to read the Edmonton Sun, but just threatening to give up on having the newspaper delivered altogether.

On the subject of TELUS marketing, this free stuff is either local to the Okanagan or B.C., or very recent. Because, less than a year ago, my in-laws were refused any reduction of their international long distance fee per month or the price/minute they pay after paying that fee. Even when they told TELUS they plan to move to Shaw otherwise. Except for having to unplug and re-plug their telephone modem once, to restore phone service, they are 8 months into Shaw service and very happy.

Also within the last year, others I know have threatened to leave TELUS if they don't match the "new customer" promotional pricing, and were told "Go ahead". They did. Again, to Shaw.

As for Shaw, they recently gave my in-laws a free year's rental on a standard definition (SD) digital box and the lowest level of digital cable service to go with it. This wasn't about getting them to stay with Shaw, but part of a large scale program to get customers to add more services.

On the cellular side, TELUS Pay and Talk has only, relatively recently, offered Voice Mail as part of the $10/month basic service. Before that, you "earned it" by sticking with them for a year. Then you got it for free. Before that, you had to pay extra for it.
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Re: Phone Freebies

Postby Buckley » Mon Oct 04, 2010 11:07 am

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.
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Re: Phone Freebies

Postby jon » Mon Oct 04, 2010 3:07 pm

Buckley wrote: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.

If the regular price is $14.99/month and they reduced it to $9.99, they would have to get 50% more customers just to be where they are now.

They "can afford" to give you four months of free service because they aren't giving it to 99% of their customers, just you and a few others, making up less than 1% of their customer base.

It's been more than 10 years now since Marketing Gurus started spouting the obvious truth: if companies spent one tenth the effort/money they spend trying to get new customers, on retaining existing customers, they would be smart. That soon translated into marketing budgets for Customer Retention, from whence the free months that you mention come from. Because Marketing Execs in organizations started calculating how much it was costing them to actually get a new customer, including advertising and talking to all potential customers, where the majority don't "buy", and they saw a very big number. Typically, hundreds of dollars for a simple retail customer. Not that long ago, TELUS, for example, was giving away a $300 computer for every new Internet customer that signed up for a 3 year contract. It might be less now, but cell phone providers used to cut the price of a cell phone by $300 if you signed up for a 3 year Cell Service Plan. That translates into a lot of money available in marketing budgets to retain customers.
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Re: Phone Freebies

Postby Buckley » Mon Oct 04, 2010 4:50 pm

jon wrote:
Buckley wrote: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.

If the regular price is $14.99/month and they reduced it to $9.99, they would have to get 50% more customers just to be where they are now.

They "can afford" to give you four months of free service because they aren't giving it to 99% of their customers, just you and a few others, making up less than 1% of their customer base.

It's been more than 10 years now since Marketing Gurus started spouting the obvious truth: if companies spent one tenth the effort/money they spend trying to get new customers, on retaining existing customers, they would be smart. That soon translated into marketing budgets for Customer Retention, from whence the free months that you mention come from. Because Marketing Execs in organizations started calculating how much it was costing them to actually get a new customer, including advertising and talking to all potential customers, where the majority don't "buy", and they saw a very big number. Typically, hundreds of dollars for a simple retail customer. Not that long ago, TELUS, for example, was giving away a $300 computer for every new Internet customer that signed up for a 3 year contract. It might be less now, but cell phone providers used to cut the price of a cell phone by $300 if you signed up for a 3 year Cell Service Plan. That translates into a lot of money available in marketing budgets to retain customers.


Well, that said it still annoys me when that's their offer to retain me. I know it's the "it's better to beg forgiveness later than ask for permission first" way of doing business, but with my Bell example it's just an insult to me to keep raising the prices (for what I believe is a ridiculous reason, they'd be lying if they told me it actually costs them extra money to have me using an old bundle of channels because they don't bundle it that way, and if it's the truth, they need to fire their entire IT staff) and then ONLY when I'm going to quit because I'm sick of it, say "sorry, here's 10% off, even though we've raised the prices 15% or more". I might just be an anomaly but that to me isn't a way of keeping a customer.
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Re: Phone Freebies

Postby Mike Cleaver » Mon Oct 04, 2010 5:36 pm

Some of the deals are almost too good to be true.
I know of a case where an acquaintance signed up for a new Galaxy smart phone with Bell on a discounted 3 year contract and actually received gift cards that ended up meaning Bell paid him $100 dollars to take the phone and the plan for 50 dollars a month with far more minutes for the data, texting and phone time he needs.
At the time, over a month ago, that was the top new phone on the market.
It still makes the Iphone seem like crap.
The deals are out there if you do your research.
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Re: Phone Freebies

Postby Jack Bennest » Tue Oct 05, 2010 2:33 am

Not a Telus Okanagan centric thing. I threatened to quit and Telus said - free internet and free phone for a year? - I said yes.
At the end of that year - will be interesting to see what they come up with to keep me as a loyal fan
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