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Don’t Sign That Contract!

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Large businesses spend an extraordinary amount of their marketing budget on messaging and re-packaging aimed at selling stale products and services. R&D is expensive, as is maintaining a surplus. More often than not, innovation occurs within the sales and marketing department, as opposed to product development and engineering. Enticing new prospects with smoke and mirror tactics are old hat; keeping and maintaining a long-term relationship with the customer is what companies should instead be striving for.

Telecom providers are especially skilled in addressing this hurdle. By re-arranging and re-positioning, they seem to offer consumers an ever-changing variety of options—when in reality the matrix of products, services, and pricing has changed very little. In a fiercely competitive environment where a multitude of vendors are vying for attention and subsequent business, distinguishing actual options and savings from clever marketing becomes a difficult challenge for consumers.

The service contract is the most effective tool used by big telecom to stretch their existing products and services while binding customers into a long term engagement, often accompanied by a myriad of misleading cost-benefits such as free or cheaper phones/equipment, savings on family plans or in-network calls, and so forth. Commitment-phoebes have good reason to be – while contracts are touted by telecoms as offering the most savings to the customer, the cold truth is consumers stand to benefit the least from such arrangements. The loss of freedom is costly on all fronts, especially when more attractive offerings come to light after signing on the dotted line.

The aggregate sales money a telecom stands to earn per contract can be hundreds or even thousands of dollars, and it proves advantageous to offer attractive benefits upfront in exchange for a 1-2 year service agreement. Hidden costs like activation fees, overage gouging and roaming charges stand at alarming odds with what a customer signs up for and what they will actually be paying per month. Hefty contract cancellation fines and fees to switch or upgrade result in customers being locked in—even if they are dissatisfied with the quality of service the telecom company is providing.

In short, customers benefit the most in a contract-free scenario. By not buying into the clever marketing and sales tactics surrounding telecom service contracts, consumers ultimately gain greater long-term savings by preserving their flexibility to choose. Yak provides affordable telecom services free of contracts, giving customers maximum value and savings in the long run.

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