Originally Posted by
_SpeedRacer_:
“And have you been threatening to quit every year if they don't give you a discount?
Loyalty means a lot when it comes to a person's character, a friend, but I'm afraid it hasn't meant anything for a long time when it comes to utility and service companies. If you just take it on the chin they will take the piss
”
It's a fair question, and the answer is no, for 3 reasons really:
1 - I've had Sky since 2007 and until fairly recently I've felt it was still reasonable value. It's the rapid escalation over the last 24/36 months that has mostly pissed me off, rather than the sum total of each and every increase.
2 - It annoys me that there's an established process for people to phone up, threaten to cancel, then get great deals to stay. Now I accept that it is an established business practice nowadays in many businesses/products and that's not going to change.
But if I hate subsidising other folk because I'll continue to pay full price when they only pay half or whatever, then I'm going to hate being one of the people being subsidised because I'd think I was being hypocritical. My view is I'm either happy to pay what the normal rate is or don't pay for it at all and the recent increases have now put it on the bubble of it being not worth it any more.
(Yes, I realise that's a very naive way of dealing with companies like Sky!)
3 - I'm going to contradict myself slightly from the first point and say yes, the long term trend of it IS a concern. It's pretty much a consistent £3/4 per year that goes on it now with no relenting, and that trend isn't going to change given Sky's continual announcements of how it's massively overpaid to keep the latest set of rights for whatever sport. Even if you can get a great deal for 6 months or a year or whatever, unless you can stay on that sort of deal indefinitely then at some point in the future you're back into full price payments and annual (at the very least) increases, so a customer retention deal like that is only really postponing the inevitable.
If I thought to myself the only way to justify it was to indefinitely be on the "threatened to leave rate", it would just be another thing telling me that actually the best thing to do WOULD be to leave.
Like I say I probably need to upgrade my thinking to deal with these companies to a 21st Century style of business, which is shaft the loyal customers and bend over backwards to pander to the people threatening to leave.
Originally Posted by mjr:
“If you're in contract, then IIRC you can cancel if there's a raise of over 10%. But out of contract you can cancel whenever you want with a month's notice.”
And of course all the constant raising appears largely designed to be within that 10% band anyway.