"Treasured Customer"

[dave87]

Well, apparently Vodafone like me.

I just had a chap phone me up offering £20 credit on my next bill if I extended my contract another 6 months. I've only just renewed an 18 month one, so it would become a 24 month .

Despite the ridiculous length of such a revised contract, it must be worth more than £20 to them to extend them to that sort of length. When I politely declined I was asked what phone I had chosen, so I thought fair enough, I'll play along - Nokia 8600 Luna.

Oh, quite a nice phone then, sir. Well yes, otherwise I wouldn't have chosen it?

How have you found the features? - fair enough, I guess they wanted some feedback. well, not exactly, no.

Well, as you have such a high value phone (his words, not mine) we can offer you 3 months free on the insurance. It would be 6.95 a month after, and a lot of our customers do continue it. *Yes, I'm sure they do - hence you offering it*. Spends another 5 mins telling me of the benefits...

...and I wake up again. Thanks, but no thanks.

Oh, do you want us to send you an email with the details of what we have discussed. ermm...no? I'm perfectly capable of making a decision and then living with the consequences. That, and I don't want to know about the random rubbish that they have decided to instigate.

Final parting shot - will you be sticking with Vodafone? Well, yes. I don't usually sign my name to an 18 month contract I have no intention of sticking to. Oh, you mean in 18 months time? How the bloody hell am I meant to know?. Err, yes, but I'll look around when renewal comes around.

So, the net effect is they have phoned me, taken up a good 10 mins of my time, and told me about stuff I either don't want or already know. Oh the joys of modern profit maximising business.

[greenalien]

Subscribe to TPS TPS Registration
and get rid of most calls like this. Remember, it's your time they're stealing...

[Saracen]

Well, apparently ...... <details edited> .....

Which is why when anyone tries to offer me any product or service on the phone, by cold call, my reply (if I'm in a good mood) is invariably that I'm not interested.

If they persist, I'll either just hang up or repeat that I'm not interested ..... rather less politely. If they still persist, the third "not interested" is likely to be phrased in such a way as to risk melting the armour on a main battle tank. They generally get the message then, if they haven't got it before .....

.... which is that I don't want cold calls. Period.


And if I wasn't in a good mood, I'm likely to jump straight to stage 2, or occasionally, stage 3.

[dave87]

That is usually true of myself, too.

However, it was the cunning way in which Vodafone (or the operator individually) dressed it up as a Customer Service call.

Those I have no problems with, and am quite happy to spend a few minutes (which it usually is at most) giving my opinion. But its the way the guy suddenly switched between the two which annoyed me.

Oh, and I'm already registered with the TPS, (unless renewing a phone contract changes that - same number) so are they in breach of it?

[Saracen]

If it actually was Vodaphone, and not someone attempting a cold switch-selling call by pretending to be or implying that they were (which is far from unknown in the cellular market), then I'd say that it'd only be a breach if you've explicitly told Vodaphone not to cold-call you. Otherwise, as far as I remember, it's within the code to place marketing calls to existing customers.