Is ZOL Offering A Secret Discount To Customers Who Left After Their Price Hikes?

So apart from being addictive Twitter can, on occasion be a very good source of information. Such an incident occurred when I was on Twitter this morning. I came across a tweet that claimed that ZOL was charging customers who were no longer subscribed discounts to return to the provider.

Ko @ZOLconnect you've called the customers that left after the HUGE price hike and offered them a 25% discount. Why don't you just do the right thing and offer all of us the 25% percent discount PERMANENTLY? Reward your customers' loyalty!! You may find some will return! @Techzim

— Ba'Zuva (@NdiniIsheWacho) February 6, 2019

Now the tweet was a bit devoid of context so I had to dig around a bit and find out, what exactly happened.

I got in touch with the former customer (who refused to be identified) and he explained that after ZOL’s most recent price hike last year, he migrated to TelOne Fibre and did not subscribe for Fibroniks again. To his surprise, he received a call from ZOL two days ago and they were asking why he unsubscribed and he explained that the pricing had become too aggressive and the way in which the pricing was announced was not to his taste. The ZOL rep he was speaking to then asked him if he was interested in resubscribing and as an incentive, they offered him a 20% discount. He’s not entirely sure if the discount was 20 or 25% but he declined because it was still too expensive and to make matters worse that discount would only apply for the first month.

What did ZOL have to say about this?

We got in touch with ZOL to understand what their stance was and if they were indeed offering these discounts and they are yet to respond to our request for comment

This is not anything new…

Though we haven’t heard wind of this in the Internet Service Provider space this is not an entirely new thing for businesses to do and we know for a fact that this is something that DStv does and has been doing for a very long time. I remember my parent’s getting one such offer from DStv where they asked us to pay for a month and get the next month free. They ended up getting three months because of some error but anyway that’s beside the point.

Businesses need to keep money coming in and every subscriber lost = a constant supply of revenue. This is especially more critical in businesses that rely on a subscription-based business model, as ZOL does.