It's ok, Bell - you can just tell it to me straight
"We put this rate increase in tiny text and nobody noticed," said no one ever
A few days ago, Bell randomly billed me an extra $5.65 for no good reason. After chatting with a customer service rep I discovered that I had apparently been given notice of this rate increase on my August 2023 bill.
Well, I could swear I hadn’t, but I went to check the email just in case. And couldn’t help but laugh at this piece of nonsense:
For reference, here is what it looks like normally:
Right. Besides being the world’s worst game of Spot The Difference, it gets better:
That is literally grey text on a grey background, folks. (Who signed off on this?) And the link finally led to this:
One wonders why the $5 increase couldn’t have just been included at the top of the email, perhaps in a high contrast colour, at a font size larger than say, 6.5. Was it a game time decision? Did the email need to go out before they’d figured out how much more to actually charge?
How did this email manage to make it through what surely must have been seven bajillion rounds of editing and sign-offs (if my prior experience working at companies with more than 20 people has taught me anything), without a single person saying “hey guys, this seems kind of dumb, how about we just be honest and clear about it”?
The part of my brain which is bad at assuming incompetence instead of malice is tempted to think that this is some very deliberate price discrimination. Surely the people who care about a $5 service increase will notice and be up in arms no matter what. The only possible explanation for how doing something like this could be beneficial is that there might be a segment of customers who are price-insensitive to a $5 increase, have never actually looked at their internet bill, and won’t even notice the slight increase in a sea of recurring credit card charges.
But I suppose it’s less about the literal amount, and more about the principle of the matter. Nobody enjoys being treated like an idiot. A friend pointed out that this whole thing was remarkable similar to a passage from The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy:
“But Mr. Dent, the plans have been available in the local planning office for the last nine months.”
“Oh yes, well as soon as I heard I went straight round to see them, yesterday afternoon. You hadn’t exactly gone out of your way to call attention to them, had you? I mean, like actually telling anybody or anything.”
“But the plans were on display …”
“On display? I eventually had to go down to the cellar to find them.”
“That’s the display department.”
“With a flashlight.”
“Ah, well the lights had probably gone.”
“So had the stairs.”
“But look, you found the notice didn’t you?”
“Yes,” said Arthur, “yes I did. It was on display in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying ‘Beware of the Leopard’.”
Or this episode of Nathan For You, where he gets a TV store to sell an expensive television for $1, advertises it in the paper in order to take advantage of Best Buy’s price match, and then tries to prevent customers from actually buying the TV by enforcing a dress code and putting the TV behind an alligator:
If you’re gonna say “screw you”, just say it
The funny thing about all this is that if they had just sent out an email saying “Hey folks - inflation is tough, my boss’s boss’s boss’s boss has shareholders busting his1 ass, so we’re gonna charge you more in order to maintain the same profit margins. It’s nothing personal” - things would have gone much better. Heck, I would have respected the honesty. I don’t like it, but I also get it. We’re all just trying to make money out here.
But when you get a bunch of nonsense about “best-in-class networks” and “keeping Canadians connected”, hidden behind one of the most ridiculous cases of obfuscatory design that I’ve seen in a while, it’s hard not to respond with anything other than “yeah, ok, screw you too”.
So please, for the love of god - if you have a job that involves designing emails like this, just tell it straight. I promise it will go better than trying to convince people that you have their best interests at heart. Or worse, hoping that they won’t notice if you just write it small enough.
Probabilistic guess on gender here, based on Bell being a publicly traded corporation that employs like, 50,000 people