Telstra are making some big changes to their popular Prepaid Cap Encore offer. Unfortunately they aren’t in the customer’s best interests. Value is coming down, down.
From 31 July the offer will look like this:
- Recharge $30 for $250 ($30 recharge and $220 Cap) in calls and 400MB data
- Recharge $40 for $550 in ($40 recharge and $510 Cap) calls and 600MB data (was 800MB)
- Recharge $50 for $1000 ($50 recharge and $950 Cap) in calls and 800MB data (was 2GB)
- Recharge $70 for $1500 ($70 recharge and $1430 Cap) in calls and 1.5GB data (was 3GB)
- Recharge $100 for $2000 ($100 recharge and $1900 Cap) in calls and 3GB data (was 4GB)
The other important change is that MessageBank® will cost 89c per minute plus 39c connection fee and will be charged out of your recharge credit. Previously this was charged out of your Cap Credit.
Free Talk and Text stays open till 29 October 2012 unless extended.
Lower value is never good news, imagine the feedback their customer service teams must be receiving. It has certainly been a hot topic in their forums and others around the internet.
It was probably expected however given they actually reduced the data on these plans some months ago and have also reduced the value of their prepaid ipad recharge vouchers.
When the original version of these prepaid caps where launched a few years ago, I thought great, finally Telstra has come to town. Data and calls and lots of them. The value on offer actually increased at one stage and was a really competitor to the Optus Turbo Cap.
However, Telstra is probably realising that it needs greater security with its customers and prepaid probably doesn’t give them that. Yes it is a huge market, but yes it also moves about. How much I don’t know, but given the traffic growth to prepaidplans over the years, it shows that we (prepaid customers) don’t live in the closet when it comes to mobile plans.
Via Twitter, Telstra have responded to feedback by reflecting upon the network they have to offer and its consistent performance. However when hunger for data is growing and other providers are producing offers that is gradually meeting this demand (via both sim only (BYO mobile) and prepaid mobile plans), to go backwards in your data offer is a very negative move.
It will show up in their sales and churn away from such Telstra prepaid plans over the coming months and I am sure they will again make adjustments to try and win new customers. It is a bit of merry go round I am afraid.
