How to Lose a Long Term Customer in 3 Minutes

I have been a customer of TPG, an Australian ISP for upwards of 5 years. Not because they provide reliable, fast broadband – or because they offer quality customer service (they don’t do either) – but because I am lazy and the pain of staying with TPG has been insufficient to motivate me to switch.

That’s until recently when I moved house.

Initially I thought it might be better to stick with the devil you know – so I gave TPG customer support a call and told them of the plan. The gentleman I spoke to told me almost as a threat that such a move would cost me $100 in relocation costs. Fair enough I thought – there is probably some cost to TPG to organise someone to connect the service.

I was then told that I cannot carry over my current plan because it didn’t exist any more (I’d been with them 5 years after all – and had only changed plan once about 2 years previously). He then went on in his slightly disgruntled way that I’d have to go to the TPG website, choose a new plan and sign up for a minimum contract of 12 months.

Can you see what that means?

In the space of a short phone call my relationship with TPG was being “reset”. No longer was I a customer of 5 years standing – I was now some prospect free to roam the TPG website and choose a plan like everyone else (oh… and pay the $100 relocation fee on top).

So what did I do? I went and bought a more expensive but rather awesome Telstra wireless broadband USB modem.

But, of course, TPG had the last laugh. It took 3 phone calls to cancel my service, the online cancellation form resulted in a javascript error wasting a good 15 minutes of my time, and I was told I needed to give 30 days cancellation notice on my out-of-contract service.

But hey, now the pain was sufficient not only for me to push through and cancel – but also tell everyone I know never to use TPG, AND to write this blog post…