Threatened fee had sparked heated debate both here and elsewhere
Under the threat of a class-action lawsuit and battered by a barrage of negative publicity — not the least of which occurred here at Buzzblog — T-Mobile has decided that its threat to gouge customers an additional $1.50 per month to continue getting a paper bill wasn’t worth the pixels it was written on.
The extra fee was announced during the summer and was to have kicked in Sept. 12. Here’s how T-Mobile explained the about-face on a customer message board:
T-Mobile is committed to encouraging customers to make the move to paperless billing. It’s a great alternative to paper and better for the environment.
Since the announcement we’ve heard everything from kudos to concerns about the move to paperless – especially from our customers who today are receiving paper bills at no charge. So, we’ve decided to not charge our customers a paper bill fee for now. Instead, we’ll be taking more time to determine the fairest way possible to encourage people to go paperless.
T-Mobile had some time ago scaled back to sending customers only a summarized written bill and instituted a $2 fee for those wishing to receive a more detailed accounting. The latter fee will apparently remain in place.
Reaction to the decision forgo the additional $1.50 monthly charge was mixed, with some praising the company for “listening to its customers” and others being less willing to forgive or forget.
Wrote one: “Did we win? Did us, the little people, actually win? Huzzah!”
Yes, that’s always surprising, but what truly gobsmacked me during the debate over T-Mobile’s fee grab was that there was any debate at all: Plenty of voices were raised in support of the carrier’s plan — examples here and here — and most of those voices were swallowing whole the nonsense that this had more to do with saving the planet than padding T-Mobile’s bottom line.
It’s always been about the money; nothing more, nothing less.
As for the company’s ominous pledge to “take more time to determine the fairest way possible to encourage people to go paperless,” one customer on that message board did a fine job of pointing them in the right direction:
1) Offer a discount, as others have suggested. T-mobile is saving money on paperless billing, so share the wealth a bit.
2) Offer an option to e-mail a .PDF of the detailed bill. Most important for me is not the paper itself but the time and effort required to get hold of the detailed bill. If a .PDF of the detailed bill arrived in my mailbox, I would have no additional work to do. (No logging into the [slow] site, no clicking around to get to it and save it. Just boom, there it is; and archived in my mailbox for later. Almost zero effort for me — as much as opening a paper envelope, no more, no less.) If you offer to email PDFs of the detailed bills, I’d quite likely switch to it. But the current version of paperless is too much hassle.
General reminder, you want to do what works for the customer if you want to migrate them away from paper. “The customer is always right” is still a good motto, though all too frequently forgotten these days.
Score one for common sense.
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