Michigan Telephone, VoIP and Broadband blog

Every now and then, someone remarks to me about how few people they know that still use wireline phone service. It happens often enough that I’m beginning to wonder if the traditional phone companies might be inflating their subscriber counts (perhaps by still counting former customers that have only dropped their landline service in the past year or so) in order to maintain the appearance of having a healthy, viable wireline business for a while longer.

One of the common things I hear is that a lot of young people are using their cell phones exclusively. Of course, the fact that is implied by that statement is that a lot of older people don’t have cell phones, or at least, still retain their wireline phones. And I think there’s a reason for that, thought some of you may not agree with my reasoning.

You see, sad to say, I think that younger people have been conditioned to accept that fact that the big corporations are going to try to rip them off, and they should just accept the fact that it’s inevitable and pay the bill. Whereas, us older folks (never thought I’d use THAT phrase!) remember a time when even big corporations were supposed to conduct themselves in a somewhat honorable manner. Many corporations nowadays treat their customers with a thinly-veiled air of contempt, and older people are far more likely to say “to the hell with you!” and refuse to do business with that company ever again.

One thing I personally really hate is being billed for a charge that I didn’t agree to pay. I don’t care if it’s large or small, my opinion of a company that engages in such billing practices is that “they’re a bunch of thieves.” Now I say all that because I read somewhere a while back that the cell phone companies are trying to get more customers, and since nearly every teenager in America now has a cell phone, they’re starting to focus on older Americans. It’s sort of a marketing challenge for them because older folks tend to have different wants than younger folks. The younger folks tend to be “gadget freaks” whereas, once you get to a certain age (I’d say somewhere between 40 and 60) the appeal of gadgetry starts to fade, and you start looking more at things like user-friendliness and reliability – and maybe bigger buttons so you can see what you’re dialing.

But also, I think that at some point in your lifetime you start to think, “I’m not a naive teenager anymore, if these companies are somehow managing to stick me with charges I didn’t agree to pay, maybe it’s because they’re trying to rip people off, not because I didn’t try to understand what I was buying.” In other words, you become less accepting of businesses that show contempt toward customers (and the older you get, I think the less accepting you become).

And I say all that to point out that there’s a pretty large market of senior citizens and “upper-middle aged” people out there that the wireless companies are never going to get if they keep generating bad publicity for themselves, as in this story that’s running today in some Gannett News Service papers:

Chuck Torrie cringed every time he opened his dead wife’s cell phone bills.

Month after month, the bills continued to arrive, piling on service charges and late fees to a bill for a phone that hadn’t been flipped on since she died.

The Black Canyon City, Ariz., man tried unsuccessfully for months to fight the charges. He eventually negotiated a deal to pay nearly $1,100 in charges in exchange for the carrier’s agreement to knock off $450.

“They said, ‘Send us the death certificate and we’ll zero out the account,’” says Torrie, a retired Arizona Highway Patrol sergeant. “I paid the balance by phone, but I continued to get the bills. It eventually went to credit.”

Read the rest of the article here.
This is a nightmare scenario of many senior citizens – a big corporation acting like a bully and continuing to send bills to their relatives after they’re dead. I can just imagine that a lot of seniors will read this article (or hear about this in some way) and will say to themselves, “Well, that just caps it, I’ll never get one of those doggone cell phones!”

The above-mentioned article goes on to give other examples of the disconnect between cell phone companies and customers/potential customers. If the cell companies keep up these abusive tactics, not only to they run the risk of losing customers, but sooner or later they will invite government regulation. One of these days they will try to rip off the wrong person – an influential senator’s parent or other close relative, perhaps – and that will be the beginning of the end of their unregulated freedom. But in the meantime, the bad publicity will likely cost them perhaps hundreds of thousands of customers.

But you know what? I doubt that they care. They’re corporations. That means that no one individual needs to feel responsible when they screw up. Everyone is “just doing their job”, “just following corporate policy.” Corporations, particularly large ones, have no soul, and the entire corporate structure is designed to keep lowly customers from talking to anyone who might a) care and b) have the authority to make changes in “corporate policy”, or even bend it in an individual case. Mr. Torrie may eventually get a refund because the newspaper article will be read by those in the corporate offices, but how many other customers are in similar situations and are not able to get any action because they can’t get past first-level call takers?

Technorati Tags: cellular, regulation, telecommunications, telephone, consumer, MichiganTelephone