Trapped!

Things were not looking so good for the business customer. I'd already established that his electricity company had rolled him into a new contract ending in 2011 - and now BT announced they had him trapped until 2013 for his telephones.

"May I ask which provider you're thinking of moving to?" asked the nice young man on the other end.

I told him.

"And why would you want to move to them?"

So I told him again: "In order to put all the utility services on one bill - the electricity, the phone, mobiles, and broadband - and to save money on the petrol and shopping as well."

The young man considered this. After a pause he said: "That sounds amazing."

So I told him a bit about this company he'd never heard about that was taking so much business from BT.

Then I said: "May I ask you a question. If you sign up someone to a new BT contract, do you get a commission?"

Oh yes, he was very proud of this. He got paid on every new contract.

"And do you get paid again every time they make a phone call?"

Well, no...

"Would you like to?"

And so, on BT's time we spent ten minutes going through how the money works and now I've got his name, his phone number and his email address and he's looking at the website.

Meanwhile things are not looking so bad for the customer either. It will only cost him £118 to cancel the contracts on his four lines. I reckond we can save him more than that before June 2011...