ConEd and GHI insurance bully customers into paying on time, threatening cancellation, even if they pay they bills punctually, rants PR and blogging maven B.L. Ochman.

I pay my bills on time. Yet last night, my Con Ed bill included a dire notice that my electricity was about to be disconnected. For the past four months, my health insurance bill has included a notice to cancel IF I don’t pay on time…I called Con Ed and was told that it was a mistake and to disregard it. I asked the rep how to prevent this “mistake” from happening again and she said “people make mistakes, there really is no way to prevent it from happening again.” I wrote a letter to the president of the [health insurance company]. He told me the threatening notices are sent to all customers at the request of GHI and that “good customers like you who pay on time can simply disregard the notice.” NO! Wrong!

Rather than
mistakes
B.L. supposes this is actually a new trend in customer intimidation. While it
s certainly bad policy, this bullish position is more bluster than bust. The cost for a company to acquire a new customer is far greater than squeezing extra dollars out of existing ones or the
indignation
of providing service to unpunctual payers.

How treating one
s customers with universal contempt pays off is beyond us. The secrets are probably divulged in one of those senior year MBA courses at Stanford Graduate Business School.

Once we were in a spot of debt with American Express. We received a call from an outsourced Indian debt collector sounding like they were accusing us of eBaying the vital organs of their eldest man-child. After resolving the issue some time later can you guess where we
ll never seek credit again?

An Alarming New Trend in Consumer Intimidation [ What
s Next Blog ]

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