MoneySaving Poll: Should Ofcom prevent firms giving 'retention' offers?

A question about : MoneySaving Poll: Should Ofcom prevent firms giving 'retention' offers?

Poll started 23 September 2014

Should Ofcom prevent broadband & mobile firms from cutting their price to keep you when you ask to leave?

The communications regulator is investigating digital TV, broadband, landline and mobile phone 'retention' offers - those where when you ask to leave they try and cut prices to persuade you to stay.

It believes this could be harmful to consumers in the longer term as new providers find it hard to compete for business, therefore reducing choice and meaning only decent hagglers get the better deals. Please choose the option CLOSEST to your views.

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Best answers:

• Far bigger savings to be had by making it a requirement for "new customer" deals to be made available to all existing customers.
• Personally I would prefer to go the other way and outlaw companies offering better deals to new customers. It would save us all a lot of time and effort if the renewal deal we were offered was the most competitive they were prepared to offer rather than what they hope we will be mug enough to allow it to roll over for!
• Nightmare scenario! As a customer on a Market 1 exchange my costs would go thru the roof - I've currently negotiated a deal (not much haggling required!) which gives me unlimited adsl bband & evenings and weekend calls for ~ Ј6.50 pm -should be Ј16.99 without evening calls! Add in advance line rental which "saves" me ~ Ј50 per year and overall I estimate that I could be paying ~ Ј270 per year more!!!!
  Add in any discount that I can grab from Sky TV and you are looking at Ј500+ per annum increase
  Does anybody really believe that the likes of Sky,TalkTalk,BT would REDUCE their prices?? And who is going to come into the market for digital TV anyway?? Far too capital intensive - Virgin won't even extend their existing network in any meaningful way!
• Telcos have been virtually eliminated from villages in North Lancashire as we have built our own hyperfast fibre network with 1GB to the premises.Most computers etc running at 700mgb upload and download simultaneously.
• Why the bleeding !!!! would you want to stop retention offers ?
  This how businesses work, try to keep current customers and get new ones while keeping up with their costs.
  More nanny state madness.
• Retention offers simply make me - as a customer - feel exploited. If I decide to say nothing, the provider will just take my extra money that they'd happily forego if I asked them to. It just feels wrong and I feel I'm being overcharged for a service simply because the provider feels like it.
  I also think it's a bizarre about-face approach that new customers tend to get better offers/rates than existing/loyal customers. But it very much seems like the norm.
• If a company charges Јxx for a product, and advertises as such, then offer it to someone at Јxx-Ј10 because they threatened to leave?
  If you don't like the price you pay, leave. Simple as that. Hagglers put the prices up for everyone else.