visiter555 said:
They offered $20/mth for a year and then had the audacity to tell me that I didn't try hard enough to get my rate discounted when I called in two months ago and a month ago when I gave notice. Unbelievable...
Yeah, that's just Shaw-speak for "you need to prove that you're serious about leaving before we hand out discounts".
I've got a couple Shaw stories like that. Before my girlfriend and I moved in together in 2010, she had called to try and get a discounted cable rate. Shaw said that it couldn't be done - the published rates were all they could offer her. Then she cancelled cable. Then Shaw called her back a month later and offered $20/month cable TV (I think it was for 6 months) and she declined. Then the next month she got the same offer, and she still declined. The third time they called her they offered her free cable TV, $0/month for a year. So, she'd just be paying the same rate that she was for Internet service. She still declined because she figured she didn't miss cable enough to want it again.
Still, apparently discounted prices are available, but you need to go through the motions of cancelling first.
Fast forward to late 2013. Our Shaw Internet performance was really starting to suck. At the time I didn't realize that Telus had a
fiber line run to the house, so I was very hesitant to move to DSL and have some crappy Actiontec router in front of my router. When I called asking about the status of their network upgrades, and whether I could get discounted Internet due to the horrible performance I was experiencing, I was basically told that the best they could do was a $5/month discount (BB100 for $85/mo instead of $90/mo).
I wasn't so much interested in saving $5/month as I was about not getting lagged out of Starcraft games. So I cancelled and booked a install with Telus.
While talking to the woman who was on the other end of the Shaw retentions department (I think that was her department, anyway), she called us back saying that in spite of all the
data I collected on the situation that I didn't "try hard enough" at troubleshooting because I had never booked an appointment to have one of their techs come and poke the cable modem. And she wanted to make sure (again) that I had tried rebooting everything. Oh, and now they would be able to do better than a $5/month discount, now that I had actually pulled the trigger on giving them their 30-day notice on disconnecting the service.
You see, that's the problem. We customers just need to try harder.
I really wonder if Shaw and Telus will keep handing out the 6 month intro deals if a particular customer keeps jumping between the two of them, or if they'll wise up to the situation.