by Peter Williams

Ah, the nonsense of corporate behaviour.

I’ve been a subscriber to Sky TV pretty much since it started 35 years ago. Currently I have a package of Sky Starter, Sky Entertainment and Sky Sport which costs $100.99 a month. I’m pretty certain you have to the Starter and Entertainment packs in order to access Sport – which is actually all I want.

Therefore it’s fair to say I pay Sky TV quite a bit each year. A quick calculation, taking into account their new prices, puts it around $1700 annually.

Up till about 18 months ago my late mother also had a Sky account in her retirement village apartment. When she needed to move to the next level of care that account, in her name but which I operated, was closed down. She died in August last year.

Today I’ve just received a call from a Sky TV call centre asking to speak to my mother. I’ll excuse the operator for not knowing our family circumstances but it does seem a long time from the cancellation of the account (January 2024) till now for Sky to follow up to see if my mother was interested in renewing her account, at a discounted rate.

When the young lady at the call centre was told of the circumstances she then tried to sell me the discounted rate on Sky Entertainment and Sport together (it seems Sky Starter is still compulsory in every package). From memory the deal was Entertainment and Sport together for something like $36 a month. Currently its $64 plus GST.

I thought a 50 percent discount on Entertainment plus Sport was a good deal so I expressed some interest – until she discovered I was an existing customer and she couldn’t offer me the discount.

It’s just for new or reconnecting customers!

However, she very kindly told me I could ring Sky and ask for a loyalty discount!

Umm, I said ..why should I ring Sky when I’m talking to them now?

Oh she said, the loyalty discounts are offered from a different department at Sky – in Auckland.

“So where are you?” I asked her.

Manilla.

My experience of calling Sky on the helpline for any technical issues over the years has been one of long delays, difficult to understand accents and not always satisfactory outcomes. To call again on the off chance that I might get a discount on my monthly fee is something I’ll put on hold until I have a spare hour to kill sometime in future.

There is an old adage that the most important people in business are the customers. In over three decades with Sky I’ve never received any offer of a loyalty discount for my continuing payments to them. Friends and acquaintances often say that when you call to cancel your account they’re very keen to keep you on board with a sweetheart deal.

After the recent advice about their latest price increase for Sport, I vowed and declared I was going to cancel my entire Sky package and do all my TV watching through the internet using various apps like Sky Sport Now, TVNZ+ and Netflix. It would save me over $1200 a year.

But I didn’t, and haven’t, because waiting for various apps to download when you live in the country and your internet is through Starlink is a bit of a pain when you can just turn on the TV and get everything nice and quick on the Sky satellite platform.

However today’s call from Manilla has inspired me to think again. There’s a lot I could do with $1200.

But have I got the patience to hang on the line to a call centre? Will Sky let me have Sport at half price without any other package?

What would be really nice is if they called me. After all, 35 years must count for something. But I’m not holding my breath.

Originally published on PeterAllanWilliams.