Spectrum Accounts

A local store was paying a lot for a business telephone with the local telco and to be able to dial outside their local calling area was very expensive. At the time they were also using a credit card swipe machine with a telephone connection.

As a first step, I had them change to Spectrum cable to get Internet and drop the cost a bit. I ported their phone number to Spectrum as the cable company said the card swipe machine would work fine, and it did. I later found that the card swipe machine could also use a LAN connection and moved that to the Internet.

After things settled down I added a VOIP adpater to their router and ported their number to a VOIP provider and the set about getting their costs lowered even more. I had to do all these steps step by step as the owner was very worried and not into technolofy at all.

I finally contacted Spectrum t ochange their Business account to a Residential account. They started the process which would have dropped their cost tremendously. They didn’t need the high upload speed, the Spectrum supplied website or business email or voicemail or telephone ability anymore. We were changing to just Internet. In the middle of the change I hit a roadblock. They said that the address was a business and they could not change that location to a residential account. I suspect that the few people living in apartments in those storefront buildings were not paying business rates, but I digress. The business office sent me to ‘retention’ where the guy there decoided that he coudl just make a billing price adjustment and leave the account as it is. He did offer that by paying 1 penny more a month that he could offer free local TV, etc, but I figured that would become a billed item after some period so I declined the upsell.

So this is another case of carefully looking at pricing and knowing that cable companys currently have been losing customers, getting them to keep you at a lower price is a win for both sides.