It's my feeling that these cable/telecom companies have no respect for customers.
I think it depends on what you mean by "respect". I have found that when you're paying them the listed price for what they're offering, and not expecting services that aren't explicitly included in that price, they are quite respectful. I've read a lot complaints that claim the contrary, but I dispute the premises on which those complaints are based. I think it is easiest to understand the difference if you think of how you'd feel if your boss called you and started haggling for a $100 per week discount on your services. By ascribing a human sentiment to a company (saying that they have no respect), you're already half-way to acknowledging the parallel between their "reaction" and your own reaction if you were in the same situation.
The reality is that companies aren't human, and don't have feelings or attitudes. They have policies, forecasts, market research, and pricing models. They have cost structures, billing systems, and standard operating procedures for customer billing and customer contact. These come together to affect how a customer's interaction progresses, but to consider it "respect" or lack thereof is granting it meaning it simply doesn't have, in reality. Underlying all those things that go into how a company interacts with customers is the expectations of the company's owners, its investors, and the investor marketplace itself. In other words: Most of us.
The scientific extraction of maximum revenue while incurring the lowest possible cost is something we investors have imposed on these companies. We can choose to think of companies as if they are people, and thereby grant them the power to make us feel disrespected or otherwise aggrieved, but in reality we're doing that to ourselves. From the company's perspective, it isn't personal. It's just business.
I have fought with Comcast and AT&T for as long as they have had offerings.
My read (based on my experience working in that industry ten years ago) is that the cost-cutting tactic of threatening to switch providers has become too well-known, such that there is no longer a real cost to taking a chance that the customer will leave. The pattern that seemed to develop, within some providers in some areas, from what I could tell from postings on AVS Forum, is that after the third time you extract an introductory discount by threatening to leave, your account gets marked, and you can only get a discount from then on by upgrading your service in some way.
I think the introductory discounts are sometimes eating so much into the profitability that customers who engage in the tactic as a matter of course offer the service providers so much of a lower profit potential long-term that there isn't a business case to be made for working hard to keep that customer's business. At worst, the secondary providers are gaining as many customers from other suppliers through this means as they are losing, while the primary providers are able to focus their operations on extracting additional revenues from the least price-sensitive customers.
That's not to say that people shouldn't try to get a lower price, but rather that people should avoid perceiving the work they have to go through in this regard as punitive or negligent on the part of the service provider. They're not in business to save you money. Quite the opposite. So perceiving your own business as so much more valuable to them than it is, in the context of other business demographically categorized the same way, is going to lead your logic astray.
Unfortunately, Uverse or any other provider is not available where she lives. So we are kind of stuck there.
We have FiOS here. I've compared my FiOS pricing with Comcast pricing where FiOS doesn't operate. It's within 10%. There's really not much of an advantage to be had even with multiple providers.
I also get paper bills for all subscribed services and so does my daughter. Those include cable providers and all cell phones.
I though deregulation was supposed to lower prices for everyone?
Deregulation was just supposed to open the market to additional competitors - so those companies can make some of the profit that the legacy providers were making - so it was just about more companies splitting the profits of the market. More competitors would have significantly lowered prices
if prices weren't already pretty close to the value of the services. Consumers don't pay for things that aren't worth it - they do without things that are truly not worth the price.
