这好像不是一个忠诚顾客的年代。

Price competition makes life “exciting”, if one is not a loyal customer or has to stick with a certain supplier due to one reason or another. Unfortunately, when it comes to mobile phones, I belong to the latter group. My colleagues were discussing one fine day on how to get the most out of the telcos, which have earned a quite a bit, if not a lot, of our money. The most common and overused method is to threaten to jump to a competitor. Some of my friends have pulled this off, over and over again, with great success. It seems that the companies provide a buffer of vouchers to give whenever one calls up to threaten. I have tried this myself too, though not on mobile phones. Not too long ago, I called up M1 to complain and discontinue my mobile broadband (which belonged to the cannot-make-it category), and the “reward” of my complaint was 1 month off my subscription, and I had 1.5 months left running on my contract then. To bring this tactic to an “another level”, one of my colleagues suggested standing in front of the telcos in Bugis Junction, as they are situated very near (next?) to each other. One could just try to “scare” the customer service officer by attempting to walk to the next door straight away if he did not receive any satisfactory offer. Not sure who tried this before, but it sounds interesting enough 😛

Instead of going to your existing telco, you can drop a bait by calling up the rival telcos and inform them that you are a customer of XXX company and are currently out-of-contract, wondering if there are any interesting offers if you port in your mobile number. According to my other friend who had attempted this, he said that the rival telcos were willing to offer discount vouchers on mobile phones of quite a substantial amount.

“Grabbing” customers from rival companies can only be a short-term tactic for the telcos, especially in a small market such as Singapore. I believe, ultimately for a consumer, above satisfactory and value-for-money service is the most important. If the service level is neglected, consumers will not be pleased and the new customers, attracted from other companies, will switch companies again once their contracts end, since porting-in of mobile number is very easy these days. In addition, from the view of the telcos, it is more expensive for them to carry out promotions to woo the new customers, than to retain the old ones. Despite this, have we seen any improvement in the service in this long-drawn wave of price competition? While the battle for telcos in the mobile phone market does not appear to end anytime soon, the 2 biggest telcos have extended to another battlefield, the pay TV. 是鹬蚌相争渔翁得利，还是两败俱伤？就让时间来证明吧。