Symbiotic Defection

This is a term that I coined decades ago to describe why the major Telcos is Canada have such shitty customer service.

These days, every Canadian with a cellphone has complained about how much they pay, and has almost certainly had a negative experience with their service provider’s customer service.

Complaints continue, day after day, and for some, it can be hard to understand why it’s so difficult to deal with their telco’s representatives. It’s not that the representatives are horrible people, it’s that they are NOT customer service representatives, they’re SALES people.

The real reason is Symbiotic Defection. When there are only a handful of very large companies to choose from, they all realize that the consumer has few options. No formal conspiracy is necessary, as they’re all in the same game, just under a different brand.

As such, they literally don’t have to worry if you get so exasperated in dealing with one of them that you leave for the competition (defection). Why? For every “you” leaving for their competitor, there’s another customer from that competitor defecting over to them.

For every customer leaving Bell for Rogers, for example, there’s a customer leaving Rogers for Bell. The balance is kept in check by all of the companies offering relatively similar products, services, and value. There is no motivation to offer you more for less, except “For the first 3 months”, or some such condition, that give you a false sense of satisfaction with your defection.

I, myself, have been with Bell, Telus, Freedom (before they were acquired), and Rogers. It makes no real difference to me what name is on the bill: I care ONLY about the reliability of the connection, and the price.

The optimal strategy is to find the best “open” deal, meaning a deal that explicitly has no cancellation or early termination fees, while offering you a price that you find fair. Generally, you should bring your own phone to the deal, so that you don’t end up paying for the newest, latest, greatest phone over several years worth of contract.

With your own phone and an open contract, you maximize your freedom to defect from your current provider to any other provider that gives you a better price. The process of switching is usually done in an hour or so, and is far less painless than dealing with shitty customer service.

Defect, and defect often.