A Dash of Web and Mobile Development » lg http://blog.iangclifton.com Discussing trends and technologies in web and mobile development Fri, 03 Feb 2012 05:15:35 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.2.1 Mobile Phones And Customer Loyalty http://blog.iangclifton.com/2009/10/03/mobile-phones-and-customer-loyalty/ http://blog.iangclifton.com/2009/10/03/mobile-phones-and-customer-loyalty/#comments Sun, 04 Oct 2009 05:03:13 +0000 Ian G. Clifton http://blog.iangclifton.com/?p=51 Continue reading →]]> I have an existing two-year contract with ATT that expires in roughly seven months. The phone that I have is an LG Shine, which is a great phone (assuming all you want to do with a phone is make phone calls) and was inexpensive. Since I develop applications for various smart phones, I thought it’d be a good idea to get one, with my default choice being an iPhone 3GS. I checked the ATT site to find that the 16GB version of the iPhone would be $200 for a new customer. And for me, a customer who has been with ATT since… well, I guess not that long. I used to be a Cingular customer since 2003 (and was with Sprint before that). Anyway, for me the iPhone is $400.

I checked at an ATT store in person because I thought I could make a deal. I owe them less than half of my contract, so maybe I could get the iPhone for half the difference ($300), but they wouldn’t do that. Interestingly enough, the contract breakage fee is $175 (not sure if you can do this but it would actually be cheaper to break the contract and sign as a new customer than to re-sign as an existing customer!). They don’t want to give me a deal for $300 and have me go from a $45 monthly payment to a $75+ monthly payment. Instead, they want to wait until the last moment to offer me a deal, hoping that I’m really impatient. Of course, at that time other carriers might be looking a lot more appetizing. More Android devices are coming out, and the Pre will probably be pretty cheap with its sibling, the Pixi, coming out. Plus, data plans are cheaper with other carriers such as T-Mobile.

What ever happened to rewarding customer loyalty?

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