Automatic service upgrades

Ever bought something ... only to discover shortly thereafter that a new model was launched the following month? Isn't that irritating in the extreme? When I attended sales training many, many years back I was taught "Don't sell futures - it makes people wait for the new product and means you miss this month's sales target". But it's poor rule - following it is too short term, and in the medium term you end up with dis-satisfied customers who don't recommend you to others because they don't trust you - however good your product.

In the services industry, there shouldn't be a worry about selling futures if good upgrade paths are provided. There are many who don't. Thought. Many years back, we bought 20Mb of web space at Totalweb, and a domain registration. Very reasonable 200 pounds per annum at the time, but gradually the price got out of line. Automatic upgrade offered? No. Made easy for us to tranfer the domain elsewhere? No - that was a long correspondence; as I recall, one form (which had to be faxed) got rejected because I had put a tick not a cross against the option I wanted! Another similar story outside the computing arena - a building society account which was used for long term savings and mysteriously slipped from a good interest rate to a dreadful one. Why DO certain suppliers work like this? Shouldn't they want to have their business thrive by having happy customers selling on for them?

We use a number of excellent service providers - who's products are updated to track the market.

Our main web site is at Hurricane Electric where we started off with (I think) 100 Mbytes of storage which stepped up to 1 Gbyte and just as that was getting tight it went up to 5 Gbytes. Traffic limit went up from 10Gb per month to 100Gb per month recently too. (And it turns out that the timing of that is exactly right for us.

Our internet connection is through TeleWest - using their blueyonder service. Starting from the initial 500Mbit connection offered, we twice chose to upgrade to 1Gb and 1.5Gb connections, at extra charge. Since then, they have increased the top connection speed to 3Gb and just recently to 4Gb - automatically, and at no additional charge.

I would be very reluctant to move our business away from either Blueyonder or Hurricane Electric, and I'm happy to be writing what is, in essence, and unsolicited testimonial for them.
(written 2004-12-19, updated 2006-06-05) 2998

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G502 - Well House Consultants - Business Practice
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  [77] Telephone systems - (2004-10-07)
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  [27] Sales technique - (2004-08-25)
  [15] 90 to 10 or 80 to 20 rule - (2004-08-15)

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