Vodacom – How NOT to make money

Jun 30, 2006 by Rain Maker

You’ll have to forgive me. The next couple of posts are going to be complete rants.

Vodacom is a cellular network in South Africa. Vodacom is probably the BIGGEST cellular network in South Africa. What does that mean? It means they don’t need any more clients/customers/plebs.

I spend a lot of money on my Vodacom cell phone contract. My subscription is only about R200 a month, and yet I make about R2,500 worth of calls a month. MTN and CellC are the other Cellular Networks in South Africa. They offer the iMate K-Jam phone free on a R430 a month contract. At Vodacom, on the same contract, you have to pay in R2,700.

I asked Vodacom if they were willing to give me the phone for free, because if I cancelled and went to another Service Provider, I could get the phone for free. I even said I was a “loyal customer” for the last 6 years. What could they do for me? The biggest discount they were willing to give me was R1000…

Is that clever? Is that wanting to keep a client who spends money? It’s almost like free money in my mind. They would make up the “loss” in 2 months. But Vodacom doesn’t know how to keep customers.

Read the next post to hear how nice it was to actually cancel my Vodacom contract…