Janice‘s contract with Rogers Wireless is due in a few months. She is looking to renew her contract so she can get the Sony Ericsson Xperia X10.
I told her to call Rogers customer relations (aka retentions) to negotiate a better plan before renewing her contract.

The goal is to get the following features for a total of $48.50 per month:

• 300 daytime minutes
• unlimited weekends and evenings starting at 6PM
• My5 Canada-wide
• Call display, voice mail, and 2500 text messages
• At least 500MB data

This goal is very doable and it is well documented on RedFlagDeals forums.

Called several times to retention and got nothing but stupid “unlimited” student plans. For $50 a month she gets 500MB data, My5 Canada OR unlimited network calling. Adding call display and this and that and the total will be close to $70 per month. This is a joke! It’s almost worse than what she already has. How do they retain customers with such ridiculous plans and prices?

I did some research first on RedFlagDeals, and I have noticed that Fido or Rogers will most likely offer the retention plan when someone calls to complain about expensive monthly bills.

They offered me this:
200 minutes day time, unlimited evenings starting 5 PM & weekends – $17.50
unlimited network calling between Fido and Rogers customers – $10
call display, voice mail, 2500 text messages – $10
6GB mobile internet data – $20
no system access fee and no 911 fee

The total per month now is $57.50. Very similar to what I was paying before. But now I have 6GB of data usage per month. Before I was paying the same price without any data. I have an iPhone 3G, so it was quite stupid not having a data plan. The $57.50 special retention plan with 6GB data is quite popular among Fido deal hunters on RedFlagDeals. I am very happy with this offer since I also got the new iPhone 3GS almost for free with my Fido Dollars. The only cons for this is I had to renew my contract and lock myself with Fido again for 3 more years.

Here is the trick. You don’t simply just call customer service and say your monthly bill is very high. They will try to convince you that it’s worth it. So the only way to do this is to make them think that you will break the contract and go with another company.

Regular customer service reps cannot offer you retention plans, only the retention program staff can. So you will need to tell your story atleast a few times. The shortcut to get to the retention program staff without saying a lot is to tell the regular cs rep that someone offered you a special $57.50 plan (or just make up a price) when you called earlier trying to cancel and you are calling back to confirm a few things. The rep will immediately transfer you to the retention program because he or she doesn’t want to deal with stuff like that. Once transfered, tell them the same thing. The retention staff may ask you why you wanted to cancel in the beginning. Tell them another company is having a promotion and you want to switch to save money in the long-run. They will most likely offer you a retention plan that is a good deal. Don’t accept it immediately, hesitate a little and pretent you are thinking. Lastly, accept the offer and start enjoying more minutes and features for less than what you paid before!