Treat Your Captive Customer Well

It has long irritated me that my cellular carrier [currently Cingular, but this has changed over the years] offers minutes in packages, but the fine print makes it clear that any extra minutes are charged at premium rates.

Where is the sense in that for me as a customer? Where, in my customer experience, is there any precedent for buying an incremental amoung more product and paying more per unit than I paid for the last ones?

I call that screwing the captive customer. This is probably not the reason for such high levels of "customer churn" each month on the part of the carriers, but it probably contributes to it.

Then along comes Sprint, whose marketing people recognized that they had an opportunity to "do the right thing". It may not be perfect, but when I hear that minutes above my plan rate cost less than those I just purchased, I feel like they are treating me right.

The lesson here is simple. Imagine your customer is your mother (or your darling Aunt Barbara) and look at it from her perspective. Ensure that your pricing and other business practices reward (or at the very least, do not penalize) her for making the choice to do more business with your company!