Interesting marketing - raise prices, blame billing
As mature markets reach saturation mobile operators usually resort to price-cutting, bundling or value-adding to attract customers from their competitors and to keep their own. Apparently, normal economic policy does not apply in Ireland because one mobile operator has introduced a change in billing policy which effectively increases prices by around 3 per cent.
Eircom has announced that it would start rounding billing for “out of bundle” minutes up to the next minute, instead of the current per-second basis and that flat rate for calls to competing operators O2, Vodafone and Meteor would be introduced replacing the variable fees, depending on the operator, that currently exist. The changes will have the cumulative effect of increasing average bills by around 3 per cent and the price hike will affect the company’s 500,000 customers on bundled packages who exceed their allotted minutes.
According to Stephen Benyon, Eircom’s Group MD for consumer and small business, the company understands that any price change in the current climate is a concern to people but that a significant portion of its customer base will be unaffected by the changes.
Eircom may be in for quite a surprise. I suspect many of its customers won’t hang about to see if they are affected and will probably show their appreciation be taking their business elsewhere unless there is a compelling reason not to.
But why blame blaming billing for the rises?
Posted
06-28-2010 8:40 PM
by
Tony Poulos