Why can't we have simple pro rata billing?

Question

I've been a BT Broadband customer for ten years, and I am sick of these sales packages with their prefabricated bandwidth allowances and telephone or TV options. It seems to me that the BT Broadband sales strategists have a philosophy more appropriate to selling fried chicken. It's comparable to "bargain basket, 3 pieces chicken plus chips; bumper basket, 5 pieces chicken plus chips and free drink, family basket, 7 pieces plus chips and relish pack." Hence the insultingly stupid photograph on the BT Broadband web page, of a young Internet TV consumer before a flickering screen, cramming chicken segments into his  mouth from a paper basket while laughing idiotically. BT's standard telephone service was never like this. You never found that if you didn't make 2 or more calls a month, you would be charged a non-use fee of £2, as happens with one of BT's Broadband plus phone packages. Nor did you get emails saying you had exceeded your allowance and would be charged a flat-rate fine, but "we know it can be confusing keeping track of your bandwidth usage; why don' you switch to a larger, more expensive package?" I suggest a simple solution: sack all the sales strategists and sell services with simple pro rata billing. Charge customers for what they use, plus a flat rate rental, just like you do with the simple phone service. You keep track of individual usage anyway, so that you can nag people about exceeding their allowances. So why not just charge pro rata and get rid of the sales packages? Or are you totally wedded to tricking people into paying for more than they need?

Answer 1

Welcome to the forum, which is essentially a customer to customer affair and messages do not necessarily reach anyone in BT.
As a fellow customer I couldn't agree more, except to say that it's not just BT. But you have to realise that we're ungrateful wretches, refusing to give thanks for the bountiful gifts of competition that were promised when telecoms and other utilities were thrown to the wolves of big business. The fact is though that when you're sending pretty much the same signals down the same wires, the same current down the same cables, the same gas through the same tubes, you've got to do something to snare more customers than the next firm. What better way than conning Joe Public into believing that your ever-changing, unfathomable price structure, all wrapped up in shoddy customer service from minimally-trained staff with little understanding and even less commitment, is better than anyone else's? If I was a cynic I could bang of for hours.
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