Tigy’s Blog

Goodbye Telecom, hello Vodafone!!

I hate Telecom, or at least strongly dislike them and their attitude to me over the last several years.

Arrogant is the word I would use, stupid also comes to mind.  They have lost my business over $100 they forced me to pay for moving house, actually its worse than that because I agreed to pay half of it, fair cop getting charged to change your number, but charging me to disconnect and then again to reconnect seemed criminal to me.  I mean I was never actually disconnected, they admitted it didn’t cost them anything like that to move me over and that they only did it because they could.  I think the exact words they used were: “If we had some competition we probably couldn’t get away with charging this.”

Little lesson for Telecom here (and to my new friends at Vodafone if they’re listening).

You fought hard to squeeze $50 out of me when I moved.  I told you I would leave you when I got a chance.  I moved but you got your $50 - what did it cost you?

Lets see, I’ve been with you for about 15 years, lately spending about $90 a month and intending to keep doing that.  So over 15 years that’s $16,200 dollars worth of revenue for you.  But you did get your $50 so we can offset that against your loss, and 15 years is a long time so lets call it 10.  That means you’re down $10,750 dollars - not allowing for any inflation over the next 10 years.  Throw into that the cost of all the advertising you’ll do to try and win my business back, the TV, telemarketing and so forth and it’s not looking good.  Perhaps you should have just charged me the $50 to move house like I told you, and you admitted, was fair.

Just for the record this is a concept called Customer Lifetime Value and CLV is sometimes made a much more complicated equation than this.  I’ve spent hours pouring over numbers to accurately calculate CLV but at the end of the day it really is a simple concept and should be implemented simply.

Anyway I’ve moved it all over to Vodafone now, phone, broadband and mobile.  The outgoing caller ID on our phone is finally working (which Telecom said was a problem with our phone) and my internet speeds have shot up. My previous (Slingshot) full speed plan was giving me between 25-250 kb/s download (yes they had the cheek to call this ‘broadband’) and about 100k upload. My test last night delivered 8000kb down and 650kb up, at its worst thats 320 times faster - iTunes actually works again and a 3 minute Youtube video isn’t taking 15 minutes to load!! I’m a happy guy.