Okay, I work for Verizon Wireless. As such, I deal with customers on a regular basis who feel they have been cheated out of their money by the big red corporation. Of course they haven’t, they’re just lazy and don’t pay attention to what may cost them money or what they may have agreed to in the contract. To be honest, I’m kind of sick and tired of dealing with those kind of people.
Now, Verizon Wireless’ policy is not only fair, but more than fair. We have policies that allow for customers to make mistakes to a certain degree and not have to deal with the full consequences. There is a big however, though.
The business model of the wireless phone company must be revised. I don’t care if it’s Verizon Wireless or if it’s anybody else, but having been on the receiving end of a million complaints, I think there is one solution that can solve the wireless business model’s woes.
Currently, if any given customer exceeds their chosen plan allowance, they pay anywhere from $0.25 to $0.45 per minute, usually at the higher end. I spoke with two customers today who exceeded their allowance by over 300 minutes. That’s between $75 and $135 added to their regular monthly bill. Obviously, if one of your bills is over $150 more than you expected, you would be rightfully upset. Well, that’s when they fault the company for overcharging them on their bill. Inevitably, they either threaten to leave for another carrier or they deny that they made those calls. The fact of the matter is that they exceeded the allowance they agreed to and therefore are paying the agreed upon overage rate. Right? Okay. So Verizon Wireless says that if you change your plan to avoid these overages in the future, we forgive at least 25% of the overage. So in the above example, $34 or more. This generates thousands of calls and walk-ins every day.
What if you could never go over? Well there’s the unlimited options – $139.99 for everything including the Navigator. That’s per month, per line, buddy. More and more carriers are moving to an unlimited focus because people don’t want to have to watch their minutes or pay the excessive overage costs when they forget.
But what if, instead of committing to unlimited just for peace of mind, your plan automatically adjusted based on your usage? It’s not like it would be a difficult thing to program into the billing process. The programming is already done in other places, you would only have to copy and paste and adjust some variables and create some conditional code to execute if the plan needed changing.
So instead of $135 for 300 minutes over, generating a call or walk-in, which costs the company in payroll, and then adjusting the balance due, which affects the company’s bottom line, have the plan change at the end of the cycle. I mean, sure, there would be some legal disclosures like, “Your plan may change by itself, but only if it saves you money, so don’t freak out,” but even if the auto-adjusting plan cost a premium of double the cost of the difference, the customer would only pay $40 instead of $101, nor would it end up costing an additional $10 for the company to pay a representative to sit there and wait for 10,000 calls about the same issue every single day.
Besides, if I had a plan that shifted my monthly cost based on my usage and not on what I THOUGHT my usage was going to be, there would be a lot less variance in my bill if I were to be dumb and not choose the right plan or underestimate my kids’ usage when school starts back up again.
Seriously.
I’m just tossing this idea out there, and using the only wireless company I know as an example, but I don’t care who takes this idea and runs with it. It will only be to everybody’s benefit, and it won’t seem like the wireless corporations are hoping the customer goes over to increase their profit margin. Instead it will seem like they have the customer’s interests at heart – even though they will still be making profit from those who overuse.