Archive for June, 2010

Maybe today is just a bad Monday, coming off a sunny nice weekend, but I am continually speaking with customers who no longer care about the value of service or quality of network they are getting if they could just save 5% to 10%.  I am not talking 5% to 10% from $10,000.  I am talking about $500 to $2,000, which is not a whole a lot of difference for a proven reliable existing service.   Is it the recession, which we are supposedly slowly getting out of or are there just so many choices and prices or so cheap, consumers do not care.  Consumers are starting to take the stance, “the price is so cheap and unbelievable, if it does not work out, I will go find something else.”  I feel consumers are no longer realizing the cost for their own time.  As our time gets more valuable, with the popularity of Face book, Twitter, and IPhones,  consumers would rather spend hours working on finding better pricing for their services, instead of working with their current reliable vendor, and making a win-win.  Sometimes consumers forgot what made them successful to begin with or where to spend their time where it is most valuable.  Today was the last straw for me, when a customer wants to move this 4th of July weekend in 4 days, and was insulted that we charged them a $400 one time fee for us to process the order, manage and coordinate our vendor to a site survey, roll a truck to pick up the old equipment and take out the cabling, roll another truck for the new location to cable and place of new equipment.  I might be out of line on this, but the price of gasoline and paying employees to do this job on short notice does cost money.  I would love to hear from people their thoughts and if they are experiencing the same thing and what you have done to combat this reality.