Dear Internet Service Provider,
I am in receipt of your letter (wherein you call me a “Valued Customer”) warning that my promotional rate for Internet service will soon end. My unpleasant coincidence, this letter arrived the day after I received your invoice for this service with my new, inflated amount due.
Dear Internet Service Provider,
I am in receipt of your letter (wherein you call me a “Valued Customer”) warning that my promotional rate for Internet service will soon end. My unpleasant coincidence, this letter arrived the day after I received your invoice for this service with my new, inflated amount due.
In your missive, you express your desire to ensure that I continue to receive the best value for my service. Given a sum of money you now demand, please understand that my perception of the value I am receiving has gone down as drastically as your price has gone up.
When starting with your service a year ago, a mere $30 monthly allowed access to the Internet via your wires and servers. When that reduced rate expired six months ago, you showed some forbearance, granting me the privilege of paying $35 a month.
Now, a full year into our relationship, you have informed me that $45 a month — what I thought would be the highest I’d ever pay — was a temporary price, and the real, true fee for looking at kitten videos ad nauseum will be (until you raise it again) $67 every page turn of the calendar.
May I ask which the marketing nitwit came up with this scheme? And how could you ever think I’d perceive value in receiving the same product yet paying more than twice as much as I did six months ago?
Honestly, if every day for weeks cappuccino cost three dollars, how would you feel if the shop announced that was merely a promotional charge and the same hot, foamy drink would now cost six bucks? Likely your reaction would be the similar to mine — you'd look for another place to buy coffee, just like I am exploring other Internet service options.
I appreciate your invitation to call your “personal consultants” to review my account and “explore pricing and packaging options.” Regretfully, I do not hold much hope for this conversation, given my recent interaction with your Customer Retention Specialists. Contacting them after receiving my new higher-priced bill, I was told no further rate relief was available.
Now, if I chose to bundle more of your overpriced products, like home phone or cable television, a complicated, confusing world of pricing options would be open to me. I do not, however, wish to buy anything else from a corporate monolith that begs for patience while I’m on hold due to “unusually high call volume,” a phrase that really means “we’re not willing to hire enough people to deliver timely customer service, because that's just not a priority for us.”
Tell you what, ISP. At your first convenience, let me know how much you’d be willing to lower my rate to keep me as a customer. If that’s not possible, please inform me how long I need to not be your customer in order to receive your New Customer Promotional Rate.
Wishing you nighttime visits from the ghosts of Internet access past, present, and future, I remain –
Your Valued Customer
Pat Grimes, a former South Bay resident, writes from Ypsilanti, Mich. He can be reached at pgwriter@inbox.com
