Why do I have to learn how to use a company’s business model?

Sometimes dealing with a company who are selling a fairly simple commodity isn’t as straight forward as it should be which tends to annoy me. This has happened to me personally a few times now, then a colleague mentioned it to me again a couple of days ago and I thought it’d make a good topic for an article.

To explain what I mean I’ll use a couple of examples. The first example is that a number of years ago I was in the process of upgrading our company mobile phones. It turned out that if you upgraded the “leader” phone (the main phone on the account) without upgrading all of the rest at the same time meant that the level of phones you could get for the other users on the account was suddenly reduced. This seems ridiculous to me. If we are entitled to upgrades then we should continue to be entitled to those upgrades regardless of which phone gets upgraded first.

Basically this meant I had to learn enough about their business model to use it in order to not get screwed by them! In this example I ended up writing to the head of customer retention complaining about their stupid practices and got what I wanted. It shouldn’t have taken so much time and effort for me to continue to be a customer for them. 

Another example is internet service providers (ISPs). I’ve heard plenty of stories about the ISPs improving the packages that they offer to their customers over time. That’s perfectly normal, the market is very competitive and they have to move things forwards to keep up with their competitors. 

What isn’t right is when they don’t pass on those lower prices or better features on to long standing, loyal customers. We had an ISP who dramatically lowered the prices they charged for the exact same service that we were on. We were not in any long term contract with them as the charges ran from month to month yet they didn’t give us the savings until we spotted it and asked for them.

On the one hand, you might think that’s good business practice because they are keeping the money in their accounts until the customer is observant enough to notice. I say it’s terrible business practice because pretty much without exception – the customer will feel cheated and aggrieved by their suppliers behaviour – put simply, it’s not fair. I think that will lead to customers looking for alternate suppliers. 

We had a similar situation a few years ago but with us as the supplier. We had a client who was renting a piece of software from us and had been doing so for a couple of years and were making a reasonable profit from the deal. 

We started off renting the software because it meant we had more control over things and the software wasn’t really at the stage where it was ready to be sold. After a couple of years, we decided we were ready to start selling the software. 

At the time we took the decision to sell the software, I felt very strongly that the only course of action was to inform our existing customer that they could now buy the software for much less than they had been renting it for. There weren’t any downsides to the customer and they are a large corporate with far more money than us but I still felt it was the right thing to do. 

I guess the point for me is that it’s important to treat people as you would want to be treated. If you know that if you were in the same situation you would feel upset or annoyed by the actions of a supplier then don’t do those things to other people. 

I’ve always said that it would be really easy to be rich if you have no morals but having a clear conscience is probably more important to me. You can still be rich but it might take a little longer!