I’m leaving the country and I have contracts to cancel. Contracts like those for cellular telephone and vehicle-tracking services.
The difference is that Tracker actually gives a shit about their customers (even those who are shortly to cease being their customers) while Cell C doesn’t.
For both Tracker and Cell C, I still have about 11 months remaining on my contract. Tracker magnanimously gave me a 50% discount on the settlement amount, while Cell C want to charge me a R1,000 penalty fee.
Tracker cares what I think about their brand, even if I’m not a customer of theirs. This could be because I might have cause to give a vehicle-tracking service a recommendation. “Hey, Jimmy. Tracker provided pretty good service. Why not use them?”
Even if I don’t give a recommendation, they certainly don’t want me to have anything bad to say about the company or the brand. I mean, pissed off customers typically put a lot more effort into complaining than happy customers put into complementing. Unhappy customers might bad-mouth the brand. Complain to friends. Blog about the poor service and unreasonable contract cancellation terms. Screw around with the logo. Perhaps they might tweet about it, or post it on Facebook. It could go viral. It could become the next internet meme. Tracker wouldn’t want to even risk such a thing, no matter how small the chances of it happening are, while Cell C have made it all the way to the “post it on Facebook” phase.
The Waffle Group 