£25 'admin charge' to change your price plan on Three UK?
I had a series of mails in today from an apoplectic Three UK user. He’s a good friend and I regularly go-on about Three to him whilst he’s patiently gritted his teeth. He’s a reluctant fan of Three at the best of times. He phoned up Three this afternoon to change his price plan. He wasn’t using all his minutes and he decided to see if he could swap to another tariff. Read on to see what took place…
I was on an expensive price plan with three. I wasn’t using anything like the inclusive minutes and texts so I called them today to change price plan. Did you know that their policy is to charge customers a £25 ‘administration charge’ for each tariff change? A touch excessive, but I understand where they’re coming from – they’re losing money when customers move so it makes a certain amount of commercial sense.
What really fucked me off is that they restrict which tariff you can move to. They only let you move down in value by one step. So I can’t actually change my plan to the one that would suit me best.
Or rather, I could – but it’d cost me another £25.
I’ve written to their customer services people, but this is a really fucking sharp practice.
Roll on July and the end of my contract! I’m thinking it’s back to the arms of vodafone in July.
Oh dear. Deary me. Just when I was going off on one about how good their new £15/month ‘500 minutes’ price plan was (not just me, reader Darren reckoned it was a genius move), you find out that they’ve implemented some dumb marketing policy.
This chap has been a rather annoyed Three UK user for a good 20 odd months. He’s the type of person that looks at me strangely when I make positive comments about Three. His experience has been universally mediocre — and the ‘that’ll be £25 please’ policy has knocked it on the head for him. I’m sat there extolling the virtues of the X-Series to him and, frankly, looking a total arse as a result.
What company charges their customers to CHANGE price plan? And then LIMITS the price plans they can choose? Is this normal practice? Surely not?
