Do Some Companies Really Prefer The Phone?

I like to preface this by saying I resisted getting an email address until I was almost 18 years old. I actually even had a pen pal through high school, you know, the old-fashioned kind involving stamps and (in our case) elaborately decorated envelopes.

But now, I am an email girl. I like things in writing (especially things promising me money). I like issues communicated to me when it is most convenient for the other person to send and when it's best for me to read. I can use the search function to find correspondence I know I have and I can access it all from anywhere. It is the way of today, and of the future as far as I can see.

So why does Time Warner, a cable company with a state of the art website, send postcards to call them?

My friend Mel called me exasperated this afternoon. She was on the Time Warner cable website where she was about to order a basic cable plus internet package at about $80 a month. Only then she checked her mail right before she was about to do this and got this postcard:

This is the card only special people get in the mail that requires you to call in. What the...?

Yup not $20ish a month for cable which was the online price. $9 for the first year.

So Time Warner paid $0.20ish cents for the direct mail, then paid for the phone call Mel made and a person to take the call. This cost them maybe $1-$2 to make this sale.

Filling out a form online seems infinitely easier, not to mention cheaper.

"All I had to do was call, but does this make any sense?" she asked.

Companies may not like it when people bargain but it sounds like, at least in this case, they are rewarding the squeakier wheels who read their mail carefully.

Am I just over simplifying this? Is the phone time an opportunity for the company to upsell, or is there some reason why this isn't written on their website and otherwise easy to sign up for? Oh, and have you heard if other companies are doing something like this?

Comments

[bouncing back betty]

Probably it's a time to do an upsell when they have you on the phone. Sometimes those customer service agents talk fast!

I wish I could get basic cable for the $9/m in my area. I rescanned my TV over the weekend and now only have 1 digital channel when I had 7 last week.