Bad Marketing Decision

So today's Road Runner bill came and once again proves the general stupidity of corporations.

On the front and back of my bill is an ad for the new "Lighting-Fast!" service. On the back it specifically states "Road Runner has increased its speed but not its price." This is eye-catching marketing that is perfect for customers like myself who do online gaming, music & video streaming and frankly live in front of my computer. A friend who works for TWC has hinted to me that the company has been increasing it's bandwidth for all customers. This I assume is to help deal with the rising tide of FioS. I opened the notice expecting to see details relevant to me.

Except, when I open my bill there's a notice inside that states "Attention High Speed Internet Customers." Uh oh! Seems they are raising my rate by 6%. In other words, in the same mail that they advertise an increase in service w/out a rate increase I get a rate increase. WTF? My urge to call customer service was HIGH! Since I once worked in customer service, I stopped myself.

There is good news. The speed increase already happened. I noticed it a few weeks ago. They increased us to 7Mbps from 5. And my experience with TWC/Road Runner has been very good. In 3+ years, I can still count a handful of real service outages or problems. In those rare situations where I've had to deal with them, customer service has always been helpful. And, they are still the only viable game in town for me. We have DSL in the area, but it's only the 3Mbps service. Since we don't have home phone service, we would have to pay too much to justify the loss in bandwidth.

Sigh! I'm just not happy when I get bullshit in the mail. I also think that the juxtaposition of that advertisement with a notice about a bill increase demonstrates internal problems with the company. It shows that different departments aren't talking. That's never a good sign to a customer.