Another cell phone tale

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I know everybody out there has his or her own horror tale when it comes to his or her cell phone service provider. This may be helpful to all those out there that are not particularly happy with theirs.

My carrier is SunCom. I have the UnPlan, and I’m pretty pleased with it. The catch with these people is they have a very sneaky way of roping you into automatic renewal of contract on anniversary date. I do believe they are the only carrier that does this. Most people, including myself, become aware of it when they call SunCom up and tell them they want to cancel service. They say, “no problem Mr. H, but there will be a $200 early termination fee, on each line!” Then they tell you that you signed a contract and it explicitly explains the automatic renewal feature. (They are correct…it’s a tiny little check box you initial as the service provider is pushing papers at you).

Now my reasons for canceling are merely based on the over abundance of competitive plans out there, most of which have some very nice state of the art phones. My phones were getting old…I wanted new ones. Every time I had tried to get new phones with them, the best they would do was give me a $50 credit toward a new phone @ retail cost.

I had finally had it with them and decided I was going to cop an attitude with them and demand to be released from the contract without paying the $200. The discussion became an argument, with the plea to speak to somebody higher up on the food chain falling on deaf ears. She explained that she was the higher up, and the answer was no!

To make a long story short I told her to cancel my service on both lines and I had no intention of paying any early termination fees..you can take me to court if you’d like.

A couple of days later I received a letter from the cancellation department telling me how I am a valued customer and they would like to make an offer to me to stay with their service. (Now remember….they were going to bill me $200/line). The offer was $300 credit ($150/line) toward the purchase of a new phones, 3 months free service on each line ($50/month/per line = $300).

So…needless to say I accepted the offer and now have 2 new Motorola V60T color phones, 3 months of free service, instead of being $400 in the red.

The point of this story is to realize that these providers are in a very competitive market, and when push comes to shove, they will do almost anything to retain a customer. The same is true of AOL. If you’ve ever called to cancel service with them, they will give you like 3 months free service, and I know because I’ve done it..will continue to offer you service for free rather than see you jump to another ISP. I think we milked them for 5 months before finally canceling and going with a cable modem.