Home Phone pricing changes - in detail

[#1]

As many of you will be aware we made some changes to our Home Phone packages earlier this week (Wednesday morning to be precise). The feedback from these changes has been mixed, however there seems to be a bit of confusion as to what has changed and the effects of this. As with all product changes some people will benefit more than others, and some people may see a slight increase in their monthly bill. I will explain all of the changes in a little more detail, and then provide some background detail to hopefully make things clear. So, what did we change? - We reduced the price of the Anytime 240 and Evenings and Weekends products from £11 to £9.99. - We changed the way that we adjust your credit limit, so it now only updates when a confirmed call report is received. This means that if customers make calls that BT data doesn't confirm they will not be charged for the call, but the call will also not impact the current credit balance. - We removed the old minimum call charge, and replaced it with a 4.5p setup fee. This means that each chargeable call you make is costed on the call length, and the 4.5p set up fee added. This will mostly affect customers who make lots of short chargeable calls in a month. - We moved to per minute charging. This means that any call made will be rounded up to the nearest minute (previously it was rounded up to the nearest 6 seconds). Again this will mostly affect customers who tend to make very short calls. - We standardised calls to mobiles, so that calls to all mobile networks (with the exception of 3) cost 9.75p per minute during the day, and 5p per minute during the evening. This is much cheaper than many of our competitors, and makes understanding charges much simpler for the majority of customers. - Geographic non-inclusive calls now cost 3p per minute flat rate. Coupled with the changes above we made some changes to our Anytime+ product a few weeks ago, so that it now includes all calls to geographic land lines (removal of the Fair Usage Policy). We also removed the cancellation fee at the same time across all Home Phone products. Obviously some of the changes detailed above will mean that some customers will see a slight increase in their monthly bills. However we firmly believe that our products stack up very very well against the main competitors within the industry, and it's worth mentioning that we have remained behind the majority in terms of pricing for quite some time, and will continue to do so where possible. The table below shows a comparison with our products, and those of our main competitors, across the main charging aspects. As you can see, our products have not suddenly become more expensive than our competitors, and we believe they continue to be a very attractive offering when compared to the rest of the industry. If you have any feedback about the changes, please either add feedback to this post, or take a wander over to our discussion forums. Regards, Mand