I can’t figure out Black Friday. If we live in an efficient economy, in which retailers such as Amazon, Costco, and Walmart, have pushed everything to the limit, how is it possible for anyone to offer a temporarily lower price and not just bleed cash?
Verizon’s behavior is the most bizarre. Their computer systems sent me the following text:
FREE VZW MSG: This weekend only! Get one of our best phones for $100 when you trade in your device. $4.17/mo after trade and bill credits over 24 mos; 0% APR. Call 866.396.3999 or visit a Verizon Store.. Device pymt purch req’d. Reply “X” to stop msgs.
I’ve been wanting to upgrade my iPhone 6 Plus to a 7 Plus in order to take portraits with the normal lens that Apple calls a “telephoto” lens. So I called the number. After literally one hour and three minutes on hold the agent answers, looks up my number, and says “that’s a small business account so I can’t sell you a phone. Let me transfer you to the right person.” Before he transferred me he explained that to get a 7 Plus I would have to pay $200 over 24 months, or about $8/month. The person to whom I was transferred said that his job was helping people with already-placed Internet orders and he couldn’t transfer me to the small business sales people, but I could call them directly. I did that and waited on hold for about 30 minutes until the robot hung up on me (presumably because it was closing time for the humans).
Calls later in the weekend weren’t more successful. Even before calling, I had tried and failed to arrange the upgrade using their Web site. Though I was logged in and it knew everything about the phone line and the account, the server offered me the low-priced upgrade offer but then there was no way to actually purchase it (selecting a phone and then a trade-in resulted in an “internal server error” page).
This raises a whole bunch of questions:
- Given that Verizon has computers, why wouldn’t they send me the correct phone number for my type of account in the first place?
- Given that Verizon knows that I have an iPhone 6 Plus, the basis for the $100 offer, why didn’t the message just say “reply 1 to get an iPhone 7 Plus mailed to your billing address”? (and then walk through some color and memory choices) Why ask people to call human agents when it can be predicted in advance that they won’t be able to pick up the phone? At least get people to register that they want the upgrade and then deal with them calmly over the next week?
- Why would Verizon want to do something that was almost guaranteed to result in hours of wasted time and frustration for a long-term customer? (landlines since the 1980s; mobile phone service continuously since about 2009)
- Why would Verizon communicate to customers that the fair price for an upgrade to the iPhone 7 Plus is $200 when, now that the weekend is over and it is easy to buy stuff from Verizon again, they are going to try to sell people the same phone for $770?
How was this ever supposed to do anything other than annoy customers? Instead of trying to get every customer to call or come into a store during one weekend of madness, why not just offer a $150 discount on iPhones until the next Samsung comes out and then increase the discount to $250? Maybe T-Mobile grabs some customers who love to stand in line a day after eating turkey, but isn’t that better than having loyal customers who are frustrated?
I have to assume that I’m wrong about all of the above. Verizon is full of competent marketing people so they are presumably doing what is optimum (though the purchase of Yahoo suggests otherwise?). My question is therefore “Why is this artificial customer service charlie-foxtrot the optimum?”
[Note that I did finally manage to get an iPhone 7 Plus on order during the fourth phone call (Monday afternoon). It turns out to be a rather bizarre process in which first the full retail price is charged and then, three months later, after the customer goes online and jumps through some hoops and returns the trade-in phone, credits begin to be applied. The guy on the phone said that it wouldn’t be any simpler in the stores; the trade-ins have to be done via the web site.]
You and Verizon do not agree on the value of your loyalty.
You look at all the thousands you have paid to Verizon over the years and see a large number. Verizon only sees next month’s bill. Why would they want to give you a deal let alone one that’s easy to redeem?
You seem to be assuming that they wrote new software for this promotion. Probably they had no budget for that. (“It’s just a standard Black Friday offer. Use the existing software!”)
So they have a system that can send an uncustomized text message to every customer. And they have a flakey web app that can be customized to support a new promotion, but it crashes if it gets some combination of inputs that the original programmers didn’t expect.
And of course they have no budget to train the phone bank people on the promotion, which is natural since the phone bank people probably don’t even work for Verizon.
There never was a $4 plan. It was just a bait to get you to come back on the next day when prices went up again. At least the call center was in a country where people have closing times & speak english. That used to be a big deal. If anyone actually did win the bait, they can get a $4 plan because it only costs 10 cents to actually service the network. The other $70 of the usual plans go to buyout packages for all their aquisitions. No-one bleeds cash.
A lot of Black Friday offers are just a way to get you to come into the store/call somebody and give the sales force an opportunity to upsell you. I’m not surprised that the seemingly too-good-to-be-true offer didn’t pan out; I am surprised that nobody tried to sell you on something else while they had you on the phone. Maybe they were too busy.
Business now apply A/B tested methods of driving customer behavior, and the desired behavior is always maximized revenue. Cell phone companies don’t really compete (If they did, they’d simply charge X for the phone Y for every minute of talk, and Z for every mb of data, and you could pick the best value for your use case.) Instead they have subsidized phones, rate plans, data plans. The Dilbert guy laid it all out in “The Dilbert Future” and called it a confusopoly. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confusopoly It’s big in banking, too. (Wells Fargo’s business model is entirely based on selling complicated, high-margin add-ons to their basic low-margin product)
Alex, Jack: There actually was a $4/month deal! I didn’t get it because I wanted the iPhone 7 Plus instead of the regular iPhone 7 (no portrait lens). So I’m paying $8/month ($200 total over 24 months), though of course I’m also paying the same monthly fee for data/voice service.
@superMike
Considering he correctly called Trump’s victory before anyone else, at least call Scott Adams by his name.
Phil, more interesting question is why you still use Verizon.
SK: Here among the Millionaires for Obama (soon to be the “Millionaires who are 100X smarter than those idiots who voted for Trump”?) the only thing that is worse than smaller government is a cell phone tower. Verizon offers a few shreds of coverage in our neighborhood. AT&T might be better, actually, but I think VZ is supposedly better in most of the other tower-averse Boston suburbs. T-Mobile and Sprint don’t seem to have nearly as much coverage in New England, but I’m not sure why.
(It wouldn’t be possible to use any phone except AT&T inside our house; we WiFi calling at home but mostly the wired FiOS (also Verizon) phone.)
VZW and ATT’s bands are in the lower 700/800 MHz range. Sprint mostly uses the 1900 MHz bands and TMobile is trying to transition to the lower freqs from 1900. The lower frequencies penetrate better and diffract better around obstacles (trees buildings hills). Its just a few dB but enough to make the difference between service or not esp. indoors where you’re on the margins.
the only thing that is worse than smaller government is a cell phone tower.
My mid-size coastal FL city encourages cell tower business, and generates over $100K annual revenue from three 20-year land leases, with automatic 3% annual lease rate escalations. The three towers are non-obtrusive and sit on two small parcels.
We would have amazing coverage if the town had put in a small transceiver at the top of the renovated town hall. Or if they required microcells at the roof ridge of every McMansion that they approve (after a year or two of hassle with various committees).
You are a patient man. If you have another minute, copy this thread and forward to a couple of mobile carrier CEO’s – who knows, there may be somebody still sentient there, and if not somebody might see how ridiculous this is to smart people.
I’m not that patient! I just stuck with it because I wanted to close the loop for my blog readers.