Now I have a quite complicated mobile phone situation.
I have my phone, £30/month rental plus usually another £20-£50 on calls/data charges.
I pay for my friend Dave’s phone, which has no rental but a spend of £10-£20 a month.
I also pay for my friend Jo’s phone, which has £30/month rental with pretty much no additional spend.
Which gives me a total monthly spend (all with Orange, all on one account) of £90-£130. Although it has gone as high as £170 a couple of times when I was using a lot of data calls.
The reasons why I pay for these other peoples phones is mainly because I’m a nice guy
Now It’s 12 months since my last upgrade, so thinking i’d like the Sony Ericsson K750i for Christmas I phoned them on Friday to upgrade mine and Jo’s phone to this.
My phone – no problem. That’s all sorted.
Jo’s phone – sorry the contract hasn’t expired yet.
So I enquire as to when it expires…
OCS (Orange Customer services): “It expires on the 17 December”
Me: “As in tomorrow?”
OCS: “Yes…”
Me: “Ok, and you can’t put it through now to be done at 00:01 or whenever the contract expires?”
OCS: “No.”
Me: “I’ll phone back tomorrow…”
Grrrr…
So 17th December:-
Me: “Hi I’d like to upgrade this phone number 07########…”
OCS: “What features do you need on your phone so I can recommend you a phone”
Me: “I want the SE K750i”
OCS: “Why do you want that? Can I recommend you *some inferior phone* which is much better”
Me: “No.”
OCS: “Right, well that phone will attract an upgrade charge of £80.”
Me: “Are you having a laugh? I got a phonebill through today that was for £170, and you’re trying to charge me £80 for this phone?”(Here’s the Brilliant line)
OCS:”Well sir, we look at each of your numbers separately, and we’re trying to re-educate customers that they shouldn’t expect a free handset upgrade every year…blah blah blah”
Cue me threatening to leave and them backing down and giving me the upgrade. For free.
Observations:-
- The fact that when I threatened to take my entire account elsewhere they backed down proves that their comment about considering each number individually is rubbish.
- Why do I have to threaten to leave to get here? I understand they have to make money etc. but if my business is worth keeping (which they decided it was)
- Why (despite a blatently misleading advertising campaign to the contrary) do Orange (and the other phone companies I’m sure) have such ridiculous disparity between offers for new and existing customers?
If I cancelled Jo’s contract I could go take out a new contract with £20/month line rental instead of £30 and get the phone I want for free. - Do they really think they can “re-educate” customers not to expect good value for money? Are we as consumers that stupid that we’ll buy this kind of thing even when they tell us what they’re doing?
- Is it a great marketing ploy to tell your customers you’re trying to re-educate them??
Anyway, I’m not massively unhappy with Orange because they did give me what I want eventually. It just seems like quite a lot of stupidity.