There seems to be a trend in business lately where companies try to get the customers to do more of the work or carry more of the costs of transactions. E-commerce is a case in point.
But the Wellington cafe that refuses to accept legal tender - the coins that are being phased out over the next three months - has surely taken the concept to a new level. The cafe owner is telling customers - on the first day that the new coins are available, mind you - that they will have to exchange their money at the bank and bring only the freshly minted replacements into his shop.
All I can say is, his coffee must be awfully good.
Competition in the residential telephone market may be on the way - finally - but a few people at Telecom are stuck in monopoly mode.
Considering that Telecom dropped $2 billion of shareholder value following the announcement of Government’s intention to unbundle the local loop, I’d been imagining the company might try everything in its power to keep its customers happy, in order to … well … to keep its customers.
Apparently not.
A couple of weeks ago when the phone bill arrived I noticed a payment was overdue. Strange, since I’m pretty good about paying bills on time, and had actually recorded this one as paid. Oh well, off to the computer to put through the payment straight away. But Telecom also wanted a $7.50 late payment fee. Considering that the bill was less than $40 and only two weeks overdue, that seemed excessive. Got the calculator and worked it out. The fee was equivalent to an annual interest charge of well over 200%. Sent a note off to Telecom about that. No doubt I’ll be hearing from them soon.
Then this evening, a Telecom representative rang. Just a “courtesy call” she said. She’d noticed that I don’t seem to make any toll calls with Telecom. That is a problem. Unless I start using Telecom for toll calls, my monthly line rental charge will be increased. Maybe it’s how she said it, but it sounded a little too much like extortion - and hardly the sort of policy to foster open competition with other long-distance providers.
Five years ago, this sort of approach might have worked. But when competitors are gearing up to enter Telecom’s turf and more people are giving up up their residential phones in favour of cellphones, wireless internet and Skype, it seems a bizarre approach to managing customer relations.
Hello! Since you’ve found this site, you probably know that my name is Neil Sanderson.
I live in Auckland, New Zealand, and for the past six years I have been editor of the nzherald.co.nz news service. Online publishing has been my passion for about a decade (and there’s more info on that on the About Neil page).
At the moment, I’m just getting this site set up and learning how to use WordPress blogging software. Although I’ve built several websites  in the dim and distant past (hand-coded HTML), and I work at one of the country’s largest websites, there’s still a lot to learn with new software. I’m looking forward to exploring this program and hope to use it as the overall content management system for this site. Time will tell as to whether it can do what I have in mind. 
In a few days, I’ll get some files transferred from various earlier sites which have been languishing on obscure URLs so there’ll be more to read here.
In the meantime, if you’d like to read my “official” blog you’ll find it at nzherald.co.nz/editor.
‘Til next time.
