Just days after Verizon seemed fully prepared to alienate some of its most loyal customers, the company is quietly rolling out loyalty discounts again. The move comes after presumably realizing that jacking up prices (especially without warning) is a great way to lose subscribers fast (Source: DroidLife).
Longtime subscribers win discounts… sometimes
Hemorrhaging customers leads to drastic measures
Jules Wang / AP
Late last week, Verizon hit customers with a trifecta of bad news: $5 higher activation fees, price hikes on tablet plans, and the removal of loyalty discounts. Those monthly credits that help many longtime customers soften Verizon’s notoriously high bills. For multi-line accounts, that meant increases as steep as $100/month overnight.
But now, there’s a twist: Reddit is lighting up with reports that those same loyalty perks are suddenly reappearing. Customers who used the old “transfer PIN” trick — requesting a port-out PIN through the My Verizon app — are finding pop-ups offering $20/month per line discounts for the next 12 months. It’s the same exact method that worked in the past, right up until Verizon shut it down last week.
And now, it’s apparently back on the menu, a day after we reported on similar appeasement discounts from T-Mobile.
The discounts vary. Some users report getting the full $20 per line, others are only seeing $10, and a few lucky folks are stacking both. One user claimed their total monthly savings hit $65 across multiple lines. In a Reddit post, one user even shared a screenshot showing a “lifetime” $25/month loyalty discount still active past September 1 — though Verizon’s own reps have said lifetime perks are being phased out in favor of renewable annual offers.
But not everyone is seeing these discounts. Some longtime customers of over a decade say reps offered them nothing but a downgrade in service. One Redditor with 15 years on the books was told to switch to a cheaper plan if they wanted to save money. Others were told the discounts would now require customers to proactively re-request them each year, turning loyalty perks into glorified promotional pricing.
It’s not clear whether this is official policy or just Verizon doing damage control. One Redditor claimed a complaint to the CEO’s office got them a $20/month discount within an hour. Another said the whole system seems designed to keep people just happy enough to stop short of actually porting out.
In other words, Verizon isn’t exactly admitting it messed up, but this wave of loyalty discount reactivations definitely smells like backpedaling. If you’re a Verizon customer who recently lost your discount, now might be the time to request that transfer PIN and see what pops up. Just don’t expect consistency. Or transparency.
