Pitch a Bitch and Penny Pinch! … by neil smith

Or… Complain Your Way To BIG Savings!

12/5/07

I admit I am frugal and I do also consider myself a pretty ethical guy. I do take wrong and right into account with my daily actions, but when companies waste my time with bad service and products causing me losses in my productivity and thus my ability to earn, or even worse… try to outright swindle me, I don't think twice about extracting my “pound of flesh” by complaining and making legal threats until I have extracted as many concessions as I can.

Just such a situation occurred very recently while signing up for a package deal for television and internet services with DirecTV and Earthlink Internet. Read on…

I signed up over the phone for a package deal where I would get DirecTV in 2 rooms and Earthlink DSL for the low, low price of $45 a month with no additional charges. This was a deal being offered by DirecTV.

The person who took my order on the phone set up the free installation time and also supposedly signed me up for Earthlink DSL at the same time. I was to expect the installation software package to be in the mail. The package never came.

To make a long story shorter, DirecTV and Earthlink never communicated with one another and tried to bounce me back and forth between their 2 companies with each claiming it was the other's responsibility to solve any problems I was having. When I tired of this game, I merely called up DirecTV's cancellation department and told them I was ready to cancel and explained why and not only did this department fix the problem, but through my threat of leaving, I was able to extract additional price concessions from them saving me a couple of hundred additional dollars over the course of my one-year contract.

The cancellation department at my old cable provider also offered me very deep discounts to stay on with them far and above what their sales department was able to offer for the purpose of customer retention. So I guess the moral of this story is that if you want the best deal possible from your current service providers, go directly to the cancellation departments and tell them you wish to cancel your services. They may only break even or possibly even lose money keeping you, but they use their number of subscribers to tout their services, so they still see enough value in you for their overall marketing power to take a bit of a hit to keep you in hopes of attracting bigger spenders for their higher-end services. This is pretty much the same as a department store's "loss leaders" which are deeply discounted items designed to entice you into the store in hopes of selling more profitable wares to you. If you play these strategies to your own advantage, you can be the one coming out on top EVERY TIME!

Please visit my flagship website at http://www.letsgetahead.com for more great articles like this one!

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