Never accept the contract renewal price!
My contract with SKY TV ended recently, and I've been waiting for a Black Friday deal to try and score the best possible deal. The new contract deal I was offered online was pennies under £100 a month; I was paying £67.50 a month until my contract ended, and so clearly, I wasn't going to accept that! So I called Sky TV today to have a chat about what they could offer me. I was through to an agent really fast, which is great, as I previously waited 30 minutes to speak to someone! I do hate the call centres that Sky use. They have the centres overseas, and I understand why they do this, fair enough; I am usually pretty good with listening to heavy accents, but the background noise was awful and made the whole experience really difficult and a tad stressful! It was like a bad ADHD experience I've had in the past, where in your head you hear loads of voices (thoughts) all at once, and it hurts your brain, and you can't concentrate! I could hear what sounded like dozens of other conversations going on in the background, which isn't ideal when you're trying to have a conversation about setting up a contract for the next 18 months of your life, and so you want to be sure you're getting all the information you need in order to be able to make a decision about the deal! Anyway, I got the general gist of what was being said. I explained that I wanted to remove a £3 a month subscription we have, as it is not being used, and so I was hoping for a much better price than I was quoted. A revised total of £94.50 a month is what they wanted! I am really not sure how a contract can go up £27.00 a month, even after removing a £3 charge from our services! It goes without saying I wasn't impressed!
After going away for about 3 minutes, the customer service representative came back with an offer of £89.00 a month. Even after removing that extra unwanted channel, it was still £21.50 a month more than we had been paying. That equates to £387.00 more over the next 18 months contract, than we had paid for the last 18 months!
I explained that it was well over budget and that we simply couldn't justify that level of price increase. I did accept that prices were going up on everything; however, that wasn't going to work for us, and we needed a better price.
The chap said that there was a price policy in place in their office and that wasn't able to be changed so that's the best deal I was going to get. I've heard that before in previous price 'negotiations', and I know that the time to pull out the 'I think I'll cancel' card; please could you put me through to the disconnections department as I think I will take up an offer from a rival tv provider.
After saying that he was sorry, I felt that way, and that the price was the best available and that I wouldn't get a better price, I again asked to be put through to disconnections, which he agreed to do.
Now I know full well that the disconnections department is actually called the retention department, and this department has the power to come up with a decent deal for you! The standard customer agents have some power, but generally, it's minimal, as I found out, and so if you really want to stay with a company, rentions is the department to talk to.
I got through to a very polite chap very quickly. It sounded like he may be working from home as the sound quality was perfect, so it was easier to have a proper chat, and we did! We discussed what package we had previously, what we paid and the changes we wanted to make. After discussing all the options, including his trying to switch me to Sky Glass, which sounds good but isn't really what we want as we have a perfectly good TV, we came up with a price of £74.50 a month, which was just £7.00 more per month, and considerably better than the the 'best deal I'm going to get chap' who would have cost me £21.50 a month more!
Needless to say, I took him up on the offer! I did try and push further, but I sensed this really was the best deal I was going to be able to achieve, and so I said yes. There was also a £20 administration charge to factor into the next bill; however, as our last bill was an out-of-contract bill, he backdated the new contract prices to the last bill as a credit, and that credit counteracted the admin charge, so it was all good. So the moral of this story is that NEVER accept a contract renewal price! Always haggle, always be firm, and explain that you have a budget (which needs to be realistic; it's never going to be cheaper anymore, only more expensive!) and that if they can't get close to that, you'll need to move elsewhere. If you have to play the cancellations department game card, then so be it; there's always a risk that you will actually end up cancelling, but you can always change your mind before they actually do cancel, of course, but in my experience, I've never yet got anywhere close to that point, they always come up with an agreeable price!
My total savings by haggling over the renewal price was £261.00 over the 18 months; that's based on a renewal price of being offered at an increase of £387.00 over the 18 months, being taken down to an increase of £126.00.. It still hurts to be paying more, but it's good not to be paying that £261.00 more than I have to!
Haggle, haggle, haggle....