Rogers refuses to sell iphone to existing customers!

This weekend I was in Collingwood for some rest & relaxation - and maybe a little golf.  With thunderstorms pounding the area all morning, we decided to go into town to do some shopping.

We popped into the Rogers wireless store to see if they had any 3G iphones in stock. We were in luck - they had both the 8 gig and 16 gig versions available.  I asked for the 8 gig version… and that’s when the fun began.

Rogers will not sell you an iphone if your existing contract with them is less than one year old.

If your contract is less than three years old, they will sell you one - but will add up to $100 more to the price.

The reason? The sales guy said they don’t make enough money from you to pay for the phone subsidy otherwise. The fact that I bought a SIM card last September and not a phone (I alreaday had a few unlocked GSM phones) had no bearing on the outcome.

Any marketer with any customer relationship management (CRM) experience knows that it’s far more expensive to acquire a new customer than to grow an existing one.

By punishing new and existing customers with policies such as the one outlined above, they are actually decreasing loyalty and increasing the likelihood the consumer will leave Rogers the moment there is a competitive alternative. Instead of being an advocate of Rogers, they are creating badvocates as my friend Craig would say.  

I know what you are thinking - Rogers is the only GSM carrier in Canada and the only one with the iphone… so they can treat customers as poorly as they want because they have no where else to go.

That is currently true - but both those statements are not likely to be true by this time next year… at which point I’ll be switching carriers.

Up next: Upgrading my first generation iphone to 2.0.