When renewing contracts Mobistar finds silence to be golden

Written on April 7th 2010, filed under Customer Relations, Life & Work with 0 comments.

A friend of mine sent me a message today. "Damnit!" He exclaimed. "I wanted to cancel my mobile phone subscription at Mobistar. Turns out they renewed it for two years a couple of months ago. They'll charge me 150 Euro to cancel it."

I've been in that situation before. It's a common tactic to get some easy money for a greedy company. I forgot all about it until a few minutes ago. That's when my friend sent me the transcription of his call to the Mobistar help desk.

"Yes sir," The Mobistar rep told him. "We called you to give you a promotion as a token of our gratitude. You received 40 free hours each month."

My friend was slightly amuzed, he overran the limits of his contract a few times since then. When he asked the rep about the overcharges and the 40 free hours, Mobistar guy responed: "Yes, but those 40 hours are applicable only for calls within the Mobistar network."

Now, this made my spidey senses tingle. Recently I too received a call from Mobistar, thanking me for being such a loyal customer (13 years and counting). Rewarding me with 40 free hours each month. I had other things on my mind then and told their rep that they would need to call me back. They never did & I forgot all about it.

The conversation with my friend reminded me of that call. I logged into the Mobistar customer center and a quick look at the subscription page confirmed my fear. They had renewed my subscription for another 24 months.

They didn't send me an e-mail to warn me the subscription was going to be renewed. They didn't send me a text message. They didn't send me a letter in the mail. All they did was add a line to my monthly bill. In small print ofcourse, Mobistar wouldn't want that to be known to their customers.

As I've said. I've been a happy (or ignorant?) customer of them for the past 13 years, sadly though this latest twist is a deal breaker for me. I can't stand this sort of obfuscation by a company, I don't want to reward a company that employs this sort of tactics.

My time with Mobistar is coming to an end, sooner rather than later. The only thing I can guarantee them is that it will be a lot sooner than the 24 months they intended it to be.