Swimming Against the Tide
A shark is always hyper-aware of their surroundings. Over the past few weeks, our sharks have noticed a shift in the savings success rate for a large “CableTV Company.” Essentially, our success rate had decreased as the company seems less willing to lower their customers’ bills. Our sharks love a good challenge! We were determined to get to the bottom of this mystery and to get back to our savings success. Read on to see how we swam against the tide and prevailed.
A Billshark customer recently submitted a CableTV Company bill that they noticed went up $40, totaling $230 per month. One of our sharks jumped on it and made two attempts to lower the customer’s bill, only to be shut down by the CableTV Company representatives when trying to reduce the bill they claimed that there was ‘nothing they could do.’ That’s just something we weren’t willing to accept!
We try not to take “no” for an answer, so shortly after hearing that bad news, we sent the bill over to a more tenured Shark who was able to accomplish not one, BUT two things for our Billshark customer:
- Saved the customer $750!
- Got to the bottom of what’s going on for future bill slashing!
We discovered that as of VERY recently, said CableTV Company has done away with plan ‘promotions’ and has solely switched to ‘flat-rate plans.’ Their explanation to us as to why they decided to make this switch was that their customers weren’t happy when promotions on their accounts expired (resulting in an increase in their bill). Their solution was to move to flat-rate plans that lock the customer into a rate that never expires. This seemed ‘fishy’ to us since our customers plan had in fact been raised by $40 per month! What many consumers don’t know is that these flat-rate plans have no contract and as new flat-rate plan pricing changes over time, that gives the customer the ability to call in and change their plan to a new fixed-rate.
When all was said and done, we were in fact able to save the customer over $30 a month with a new monthly bill of less than $200! The moral of the story? Be aware! Things can change and slip by unnoticed. CableTV companies, among many others, are making tons of money from these little changes that customers don’t catch. But fear not; the Sharks have our customers’ backs and we’re not going to let anyone take advantage of them.