Want a better cellphone deal? Here's what you need to do
Ride along with me on my Bell-Rogers-Bell journey
A two-word phrase for someone who is considered invisible and irrelevant: Existing customer.
New customers get deals, promotions, offers, toys and freebies from companies in sectors like telecom and banking. Existing customers get taken for granted, a lesson I learned when I left my full-time job as Globe and Mail personal finance columnist last year and asked to convert my work-provided cellphone into an account under my name.
What happened next was a lesson in dealing with telecom companies to get a better deal. To sum up, new and departing clients are valued, and existing customers are not.
Bell Canada was the service provider for my Globe-provided phone, which was easily switched to an account in my name after I paid a few hundred dollars to take ownership of the phone itself, a Samsung Galaxy S22. The monthly cost of my new plan: $96.05 for 200 GB of data and various calling and texting features. Take it or leave it, I was told. Bell considered me an existing client, so a discounted plan wasn’t available.
I took it and planned to switch providers, which I did in a Rogers Black Friday promotion for CAA members. The new monthly plan was roughly half the old Bell rate, but with 100 GB of data. BTW, I doubt I’ve ever used 10 GB in a month.
My tenure with Rogers lasted about two days.
