Dear Mr Theo de Vries,
Today I received the first message that I can remember in which xs4all disappointed me, titled “changes with the internet and calling”. I have been a satisfied customer of xs4all for a long time, but now my confidence has suddenly been broken.
After having practically only used xs4all VOIP in addition to a KPN subscription for a long time, I completely switched over at the end of last year and transferred my old fixed line. Less than 3 months later, I received your message about rate changes that affect my family twice: We call Belgium relatively often, and the “simplified” rates for this are going up from 2,071 to 3.5 cents per minute. That's a 69% increase. On top of that comes a starting rate of 10 cents per minute; for an average call of 5 minutes, that is once again the original price on top of that. The way this is presented is a simplification of the rates. Honestly, I don't care much about the complexity of rates, what ultimately counts is what I have to pay in total for the services. The latter is simply more than doubled by this message.
Not so much the rates themselves, which are still much lower than what people used to spend for this communication 10 years ago, but especially the unfairly positive way in which it is presented to the customer, I find unacceptable. It smacks of an impure influence of the parent company KPN on the original xs4all culture. I would like you not to alienate simple long-term customers like myself, who have always been very positive towards others about xs4all's services. I would like to hear from you that all this has been a painful mistake; a nightmare from which xs4all soon woke up.
Kind regards, Rob Hooft