Interminable hours on the phone for a little discount

I spent something like 2 hours on the phone getting my mom’s cable + internet discounted from around $101 to $69 (after fees and taxes), and changing phone services to go from a base price of $30 to $15 for 12 months. Tiring but I suppose saving around $47 a month for 12 months is worth it. That’s $564. That’s really not bad for two hours’ work.

Warning: What you are about to read is boringly detailed and tedious to all but those who love to do too much work for a little discount. Heh.

I’ve done pretty much the same thing before, but here’s how I do this kind of thing:

• Gather up flyers for competitors. Either log on to the competitors’ websites or call to make sure you can actually get the service in your area.

• Do the math on your savings. Figure out your 12 month savings and any long term contracts you may have to sign and what that is worth to you.

• Be 100% ready and willing to switch to the competitor. Make up your mind to do so before you call. It’s not fair to waste people’s times if you are not willing to switch. Plus, switching could really be a great deal, so why not do it?

• If you are really prepared to switch, call the service cancellation line and ask to cancel your service.

This process should result in one of two satisfactory situations:

• You successfully switch to a competitor and rest easy in your knowledge that you had done your research and that this was a great idea.

• Your current provider suggests a deal that will beat the competitor’s deal and can talk you through the specific details (contract terms, what the price will be after any promotional period, etc.), so you stay with your current provider but at a better price.

In the case of my mom’s internet service, I wanted to switch from Charter to AT&T. She has cable & internet through Charter. She has local phone service through AT&T. AT&T has a fixed lower price (not an introductory promotion) and no contract for internet, plus a $125 cash rebate for switching from cable to dsl, so I knew it was a great deal. There would be a small trade-off in speed, but the price difference seemed worth it.

When I called Charter, they were able to give me a price that beat the AT&T price by a good margin. Plus, they worked with me to do some funny re-packaging of the service we already have for cable to reduce that part of the cost by about $10, which meant that my total savings beats the AT&T rate plus the AT&T cash rebate.

Funny thing is, it only took me about 35 minutes to get to a pretty good solution on the cable and internet. At this point, the $101 bill was down to $88. After I hung up with them, I realized that this number was still higher than what I was expecting to pay after the changes. Also, there was one optional fee on the cable service that I really wanted removed: “wire service” for $5 a month. I mean, we never use it, and that’s $5 a month that we’ve been paying for a long time.

The extra 1 hour 25 minutes was spent on a series of calls. The first was calling to get that wire service removed, only to find out that there was yet another random $5 fee that got added in my prior transaction that I had no idea that they were tacking on at the time that I had agreed to the new arrangement, so I got that taken off with relative ease.

When I got off the phone with them, I realized that I had forgotten to confirm that the wire service charge had been dropped, and find out why the total price was higher than what I was expecting so I called again, only to find that my base cable package was more expensive now than when I had called earlier. Wha–? The person seemed unable to do anything for me, except to revert all the changes I had made earlier in the day, so I hung up and called up billing to ask about the itemized charges. Upon finding out that it was still on my list of services, I asked them to remove it.

Here’s a tip: never call billing about removing items from your service. It’s not their job and and it is frustrating for both sides. I realized this after a frustrating 20-minute conversation, so I asked them to forward me to cancellations…

… Which ended up in a disconnected call. Hrmph.

I called yet again, and went directly to cancellations. I talked them through what I had thought was supposed to happen from when I had spoken to the first CS rep, and they promptly made the changes, which brought my charges down from the new price of $88 to $69.

I then tackled the phone issue, which took another 45 minutes, only because I was hesitant about pulling the trigger on changing from an analog telephone line to a digital line by switching from AT&T to Charter, then I didn’t know if the alarm system was tied to our home line or not, then I didn’t know how much the price would jump to after a year, so I kept having to call back.

This reminds me, I need to check out Oakland cable & dsl situation out to see if we can do better. Our dsl connection has been exceedingly and annoyingly flakey in the last few months, so a change could keep us from going insane.

Thus ends my long, boring, tedious post about a long, boring, tedious couple of hours.