Level3 tries cell-phone style billing scam on customers

Thu Jul 31 18:12:16 UTC 2008

Joe Maimon wrote:

> "How much pain can we inflict on our customers before they break 
> (whether or not it increases revenue or decreases costs)?"

I see it in a different way.

At one point, a corporation's accountants decide that growth through
acquisition of new customers will slow and the only way to continue to
grow revenus is to start nickel and diming existing customers to death,
cutting customer support (aka: outsource to a different country where
the folks there are given a simple 2 page script and no other training)
and implementeing strange new billing schemes.

And in the past, such schemes have worked with minimal customer
complaints (of course, the customer service side in in cahoots and
aren't about to report to the board that the decisions made have been
highly unpopular) and those measures become permanent.

The big problem is that upper management are more focused on pleasing
the Wall Street Casino analysts than they are running their company and
pleasing their customers.