Like most people, I have a long-running “dislike” with my cable provider. I think most everyone has issues with their cable company because they divided up customers to create monopolies and have no real reason to compete. My particular cable provider is Cox Communications, but this story may be helpful for those with Comcast or other cable providers.
Two and a half years ago, I explained that Cox’s pricing was banana pants crazy. They made me take a telephone service I didn’t want to get bundle pricing. (I have Ooma’s “free” service. It’s $5 a month with taxes.) I would end up paying $40 for the telephone and taxes to get $50 off my bill. It didn’t make business sense, because $20 of those dollars would go to Uncle Sam. Why not just say, “We’ll give you a $25 off for having cable and internet?” The only reason I could think of for them to give up money and give so much to taxes was a crazy conspiracy theory involving Big Cable and Uncle Sam.
I later learned what I think is the real reason why they bundled the phone. My bundle pricing expired 12-months later. When I didn’t call up to get a new bundle, they’ve effectively “sold” me the telephone that I never wanted by taking the $50 credit away from my bill. Here’s how I felt about it:
Pretty sneaky sis, right?
So essentially I need to do what I call “The Annual Cable Bundle Dance.” That means calling them up and explaining that your bill went up a lot with the expiring of the bundle discount. Here’s how it went down last year. I was able to get my bill to $153 for a fairly barebones internet and television package. That’s no HBO, NFL Network, or add-ons like that. It includes $2 for a cable card and $3 for a dumb cable box. This is because I built my own DVR cable box.
Two weeks ago, it was time to do this year’s “Cable Bundle Dance.” It took 45 minutes and 2 transfers to get to the right person, but finally I got there. I explained that my bill was $153 and that they are showing that my new bill will be $212. They said that the $212 was an old price and that it would really be $188. So that’s about 23% more than what I had before. I asked if we can do better, citing that I have this $40 albatross of a telephone that I don’t want. He went through his bag of tricks and found that he could lower my bill to $148 by taking away some of the services on the phone and applying a new bundle. I tried to remove these extra services on the phone that I didn’t use before, but I was told that I needed them to qualify for that bundle.
With the price at $148, I saved my self $40 from what they were going to charge me. This bundle lasts for a year, so that’s $480 for around an hour of my time. Trust me, no one is going to pay me $480 for any kind of real dance.
Last week, the real magic happened! I got the feedback email from Cox and I gave them low scores (except for the service of the person who did quite well). That prompted them to call me back and ask what the story was. I explained the telephone hassle all over. She understood that it was crazy to pay $25 in telephone taxes when I didn’t use the phone. (I think my Ooma taxes are $5. I don’t have the energy to to get into why Cox’s is $25.)
She did something so simple it amazed me. She took the phone off the bill! Boom! My cable and internet is now $126 a month. It will take me a few days for the bill to updated so that I can review it, but that’s an actual savings.
So the secret seems to be to use the feedback email and get a little a lucky with the people you talk to.
As you can tell, I’m shocked. I presume the phone operators have pretty strict guidelines to sell more product and not let people lower their bill. Threatening to leave is typically empty because of the monopoly mention above. Also, here’s Cox prevents competition by making your internet bill higher if you sign up with an internet television provider like Sling or Hulu TV. They do this by taking away a bundle discount with the internet service itself. I imagine it’s hard for them to get new customers since they have their markets carved out. Thus I think the best way they raise profits is to charge each customer more.
Maybe that’s why it only took me 2.5 years of complaining to get some real savings on the two services I use.
Awesome report LM!
I have my “bundle dance” scheduled for the beginning of December, and I will be sure to fill out their “report card” with some low marks as well. I also have Cox and will report any news about my situation as well as any harrowing issues with the multiple expiration dates due to extra “bundles” added after my original “bundle” was ordered. I always feel bad for the person I speak with on the phone, there isn’t enough money in the world to deal with the nonsense they must encounter on a day-to-day basis. I really hope these cable dinosaurs go extinct at some point and we can all operate through a new internet based medium.
I feel bad for the person I talk to as well. It’s not their fault.
I’ve been that person on the phone and can attest that there is a set line of things they tell us we can do and even our managers cannot do certain things. We cannot advise you to do certain things either as if we devalue the call centers we work at in such a way(that’s what they think it does anyway), well people lose there jobs over less.
I’ve done other stuff but I’ll always hate the cable stuff. Even the inbound… there’s so much you can’t do for people it’s insane. Like simple stuff like this. There are incentives to up-sell and often they are like ‘avoid taking things off peoples bills at all costs’ in attitude.
Then there is the whole ‘don’t spend too much time on the phone with one person’ etc… it effects your numbers for the day and it’s just one more thing you can lose your job over.
It’s high stress and doesn’t pay nearly enough for the bs you have to deal with.
So from the bottom of my heart thankyou and place don’t yell at the customer service reps. Some of them don’t even know this even is a thing and some straight up are hired and put on the phones and can’t even tell you how wet behind the ears they are(a product of call centers having high turnover rates- high stress low pay jobs that tell you to take care of customers but also penalize you for doing so at the same time… yeah just please be nice).
One thing I’ve always hated is the a holes who call up and think yelling or screaming will get them what they want. One campaign I did for a company always has this because for the longest time they gave into demands from customers that did that. That basically had the customers trained to abuse the ‘customer care’ people for that job. Meanwhile your paid literal pennies above min wage so the company can say they technically pay you more than that- but not really- while working in a veritable petri dish of germs and sickness(one person gets sick and so long to anyone like me who has a compromised immune system- literally the reason for my last lay off was that- ‘oh we’re not firing you. we’re just laying you off’- as if that made a difference. Still no pay check ya know?).
In short. There is so much bs involved even with the inbound calls… don’t even get me started on the pure h-e-l-l that is outbound. It pays less and often they get off trying to do commission only. In general it makes inbound look like a walk in the park by comparison. It’s not but it certainly can look like it next to outbound.
Anyway, I’ve done both and I have but one request. Please understand two things. Outbound reps most likely didn’t even call you directly. Most likely an auto dialer did it for them and they knew your name when it popped up on a screen in front of them right as they were calling you and that’s if they do. As stressful as it is for you to be called, it’s more so to be the person on the other end of that line.
Second. Please don’t yell at the customer service reps who work the inbound centers. It’s not there fault and often there is a sort of compartmentalization of knowledge so many of them don’t even know stuff like this.
Some call centers make you fight for every cent. One I worked for even had a clause in the employee ‘agreement’ that if they shorted you and you didn’t get to them about it right after you got paid basically, they weren’t ‘liable’ to fix it. If you see that with any company run- I ran into it literally every paycheck and ended up quitting because even being on top of it didn’t help. They put off fixing it. I was fighting for half of a half because they only gave me half of what they shorted me after one particularly week.
It’s mentally very taxing work and to have to deal with that bs on top of it… isn’t something anyone should have to put up with working for any company. Lot’s of people do and I can tell you countless stories of that ‘one time’ someone’s boss took off with people’s paychecks and they were left high and dry just before rent. A good amount of people do this because it’s the most available work but it’s also very stressful.
Many of your calls are people yelling at you for things that aren’t your fault or demanding compensation for something that has nothing to do with the service or yelling at you for something that IS the fault of the service etc. There can be some amazing calls but most of your calls are those calls that cause a bone deep weariness and often the first thing people complain about is how hard it is to get a person because the companies that are why people who do this aren’t paid much also do all they can to try and make you use them as little as possible. If the companies could cut human contact out of the customer service equation they would do it. As it is they only make the process of being a customer more frustrating because of there attempts to make it harder to get a human being. Both as a customer as well as someone who has done this, I can attest that it is annoying on both sides. If you have trouble getting a person then say as much and be respectful about it, ask them to note your account that your not pleased with it etc. Some of them will, if asked. I’m not going to pretend everyone does a great job. Some of these people are at the butt end of a 12 hour day and sometimes a couple hours can feel like it’s already been a twelve hour day when all your doing is dealing with belligerent people yelling at you over the phone. Sometimes you can’t fill it out fast enough. Sometimes, especially if your new, it will have you on the next call before you can. Some places switch the screen before you can even finish doing so. Some keep it open in the back. Some do give you the option to do after call work and put anything pressing in that you couldn’t before. You don’t know what the situation is for them and often this is the only thing available in there area so it’s not like they can just up and quit. It’s a rock and a hard place.
So please be kind to the cm’s you get on the phone. And honestly? Sometimes if your nice and someone does learn something or have the ability to do more… they will. This doesn’t happen if your yelling and blaming them for things that aren’t there fault.
If only customer service could rate customers the way customers can rate us- the amount of times I’ve seen customers rate a person poorly only because they asked them to stop screaming at them calmly and politely or couldn’t give them something for free is absolutely astounding. You wouldn’t believe how often it happens and if there isn’t someone reviewing the recordings of the calls people have even lost there jobs over it. Sometimes people end up homeless because one a hole decides they want revenge against the customer service rep who couldn’t give them free stuff or touch a service they have with another company or something incredibly stupid like that. I actually had it happen at this one place I worked. Six months without a single complaint and this one lady wanted me to deal with her magazine subscriptions and I couldn’t because we only did the newspaper and she called back and complained about my ‘tone of voice’, keep in mind this call was literally fourty five minutes of her yelling at me and me repeatedly explaining that we had no control over her magazine subscriptions while she threatened to cancel over it before then canceling and then getting angry with me for doing what she asked in canceling because, for some reason, she thought threatening to cancel would make me magically have some dominion over her magazine subscriptions. There aren’t anything wrong with the call but they were getting rid of my department and didn’t want to pay unemployment so they fired me. I hadn’t had a single complaint. Do you know how hard that is to even be able to say? There are people who will complain about anything- ANYTHING. Six months of no complaints whatsoever in the position I was in was hard to get. Nobody else in my department could even say that at the time. Not even the managers could say that. My direct manager was very pleased with it and said he’d try to get me put in for a different department before that happened, one with better pay and more inbound calls etc… one complaint at a time they were looking to get rid of people and I was gone. Many of these companies are like this all the time.
There are people who will say they don’t think you know what your talking about because you look something up to be sure or because you tell them something they don’t want to hear. Everything effects your standing with the company and how likely or unlikely they are to keep you. Everything. This includes how many times people call to complain just because you didn’t give them something for free etc.
In short- be kind to your customer service reps. They deal with a lot.
I do a lot of customer service stuff myself. It’s just that the cable industry is particularly slimy with getting stuff taken off bills (as you mentioned), and in many places (mine included) have a near monopoly making negotiating pointless. If there was only grocery store, you’d have to pay their price. It’s kind of the same thing.
I had DirecTV for nine years and loved it. The price had gone up to about $68 a month, but I watched a lot of TV at the time, so I didn’t mind much. However, I could NOT have internet through it–I’d switched from Mediacom to DTV because they kept raising the cable rate, and I still had AT&T DSL on a landline.
After nine years, I had cut way back on my TV viewing, so I was only watching about four shows regularly. DSL had gotten cumbersome thanks to a boom in video content on websites and decaying infrastructure that the Death Star refused to update. Plus, I’d finally moved from a PAYG cell phone to a major provider when they offered a no-contract option, and I wasn’t even using the landline anymore.
The landline was $80 a month, including the slow-ass DSL. The new phone was $110 (I was buying the phone on time–yeah, I know, but I couldn’t afford to get it outright). DTV was still $68. I was paying over $200 a month and starting to think about ditching something. Then, it happened.
AT&T bought DirecTV.
I knew from past dealings with them that the first thing they would do was raise prices. It just wasn’t worth it anymore. So I finally got the courage to ditch my landline. I went back to Mediacom for internet only and cancelled DirecTV. With Netflix, Hulu Plus, and Britbox content subscriptions, I have all the shows I want, and I can buy any extras individually on Amazon.
I ended up knocking something like $70-80 off my monthly bills. And when I lost my job, I called Mediacom and they dropped the price of my internet without cutting speed. I just have a cap now, and i don’t even get close to it each month. If I have any connectivity issues, my phone will tether so I can still get online.
Of course, if your household watches a ton of TV and/or has a sports package, cable might be a better choice for you. But now we have more ways to tweak things so they suit our entertainment preferences. You don’t have to do this dance anymore!
At some point we will probably be able to cut the cable. However, our DVR requires a Cable Card right now. We would still need DVR for broadcast TV, which is possible with an antenna and some work. At this point, it’s easier to just pay the $40 extra a month for all the extra channels that the kids like such as Nick Jr.
I have been doing the dance for over 7 years. My bill has been $260 for almost a year, and every time I would call, I was told there was nothing they could do. I said, “give me the new customer bundle”, or I will cancel all my services. They told me that was for new customers, and if I wanted to cancel my services for …a month I think they said, I could come back as a new customer for the special bundle price. Isn’t that something? New customers are more important than old ones. So I went up to the office on Valley View Blvd in Roanoke, and the guy said “i am going to lower your bill while you are here,” …went over stuff I didn’t need, and now my bill is down to 140. I suggest going to the customer service center.
Thanks for the information, I am going to try that approach!
Was a Cox office this morning (#4 in line) was turning in a box that was not working right.
I mentioned how quick the line was moving and she mentioned that those people come in for the annual rate dance. So I said I would like to dance and BAM! my bill was reduced by $70.00 a month ($840 a year) All you have to do is ask, worst case they say mo. This took me about ½hour to get new equipment and have 10 days to drop off the old. Yes the deal is good for 12 months.
First off, I just want to say that I’m a fan of Lazyman and Money. As a frugal person myself, I appreciate your posts and how straightforward, practical, and concise you are throughout the site.
Anyway, I just published an infographic about 5 Easy Steps to Lower Your AT&T U-Verse Cable Bill and wanted to let you know that I included a link to one of your articles about I (Finally) Saves Money on My Cox Cable Bill as a source within the infographic.
Here it is:
https://frugalreality.com/att-uverse-deals-for-existing-customers-rentention/
Thanks! Cheers,
Chris Michaels
FrugalReality.com – Founder
https://www.FrugalReality.com