How about this for a cell phone plan

I got some roaming charges on my cell phone bill. Not many, but some nonetheless. Before biting the bullet and calling up customer service, I thought that I remembered that a certain portion of roaming calls were included, but only a fraction of the total minutes alloted (40%). Above that, roaming charges applied.

I thought it was 50% at the onset of the contract, but such contractual obligations only hold for me, and not for the cell phone company. They can change the contract whenever they see the need, and not notify me that they changed it, except on an out-of-the-way portion on their company website.

Now, I have an advanced degree in physics, and it took about 15 minutes for the customer service rep to explain why I had roaming charges by pointing out the appropriate numbers on my bill. They must need to take regular classes in Cellular Phone Bill Decryption to be able to explain this to people.

How about this for a cell phone plan:

Charge me a flat fee, and for that fee I can talk to whomever I want, wherever I want, for however long I want.

Don’t trick me. Don’t roam me. Don’t bury onerous terms and conditions in a solid block of 3-point text. Don’t change the rules on me. Don’t cancel my plan and replace it with a different, more expensive, more restrictive, more complicated plan. Don’t keep track of whether the calls are in-state, out-of-state, state-to-state, solid-state, or confederate-state. Don’t look at anytime, nighttime, night-and-weekend, alternate-Tuesday, whenever-I-feel-like-it minutes.

This isn’t just for my bottom line. The phone companies could fire 80% of their customer service reps, because the bills would be so easy to understand almost no one would have trouble and almost no one would call in for clarification. The bill would be one page — maybe a part of one page. It would say:

“Your Plan: Our Only Plan.
You Owe: $49.99.
Please Pay By: 6/20/05.
Thank you!”

That’s it! No breakdown of taxes, surcharges, surcharges on the taxes, taxes on the surcharges, taxes on the taxes, ID-10-T fees, 8675309 fees, or miscellaneous fees. No usage breakdown, no communication breakdown, no extras for services, no servicing the extras.

Southwest Airlines turns a profit in an industry where its competitors are going bankrupt and leaving their pensioners hanging high and dry. How? They streamlined things. Their reservation system became “You show up early, you get a good seat.” They cut out the things that customers didn’t really care about, and passed on the savings to them. Well, duh!

Netflix was started because the owner never wanted to pay a late charge again. He didn’t want to be nickeled and dimed to death. He’d rather pay $20/month (or less) to rent as many movies a month as he could watch, and never have to worry about a late fee. Millions of others thought so, too.

Maybe the cell phone industry needs a Southwest-type free thinker to cut through all of the BS, rattle things up a bit, and provide simplified, all-inclusive, no-nonsense, crystal-clear billing for their services.

Imagine the disbelief of people when they hear from the salesperson “That’s included in your monthly fee” to every billing question. How quickly would people would switch over to that service? I sure would. Especially if it were $50/month.