No, that’s not a line from the latest action-adventure thriller hitting the movie theaters. Actually, I just got a call from Dish Network and it was one of those recorded messages that I hate. I didn’t get upset about this particular call for two reasons.
Firstly, I have been a very happy Dish Network customer for almost 8 years now and I still love my dish.
Secondly, they were not trying to sell me anything so I cannot say that they insulted me by having a machine call me with a sales pitch (like TracFone did!) instead of having a real live person dial me up.
The reason for the call was to offer me the chance to give up on receiving a ‘real’ bill in the mail every month. You know, the kind that is printed on paper and is delivered by a dedicated Postal Service employee right to my mailbox each month.
From what I could gather, the main benefits they offered for agreeing to discontinue my paper bill would be that I could get online and review the last two years of my billing history and do the same thing through Dish Channel 100.
Whoopee. My Dish Network bill is the same every month. Why would I want to look back two years to see my old bill? I cannot think of a reason other than to use the old bills as proof during some kind of dispute or something.
Since I tend to save things like old bills for a while, I am sure I still have my old bills from two years ago anyway and probably even further back than that.
When I heard the recorded message prompt me to ‘Press 1 to continue receiving my paper bill,’ that is exactly what I did.
The reason I want to continue to receive my paper bill is not so much because I like collecting paper. It has more to do with what I’ll get out of an offer like this.
As a the cranky old devil that I am, the first thing that springs to mind is that Dish Network wants to eliminate as much paper billing as possible to save themselves some money. It must be expensive to send out a few million bills every month. It costs money for the paper, the printing and the postage.
I can understand why Dish Network wants to save money. Heck, who doesn’t want to save a few bucks whenever they can?
If Dish Network is successful in talking a significant portion of their customer base into opting out of paper billing it will indeed save them a nice chunk of change.
But what I wonder is the following: Will the price I pay for Dish Network every month go down? Even by a penny or two? I really doubt it. They certainly didn’t say that.
As you can see, I have no real incentive to want to give up on paper bills unless you get into saving trees and that sort of thing. The incentives they offered during the recorded call didn’t really sound to attractive to me. I’ve got all kinds of room to store old paper bills.
If you want me to give up on my paper billing, Dish Network, you are going to have to come up with a better reason. Something like: ‘If you opt out of paper bills, we’ll knock 10 cents of your monthly bill.
Ten cents ain’t a whole lot to be sure, but it is something, and I would probably take them up on that offer. At least they’d be offering me something real.
I just don’t have a burning desire to help Dish Network save money and therefore put more money in the pockets of the top executives while I am left feeling like I have given something up and received nothing in return.
Then again, maybe it’s all because I am just a cranky old devil.
[tags]Dish Network, paper billing[/tags]
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