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Someone I know tried to pre-order a HTC Magic G2 phone today as it is available for pre-order on the Vodafone website. As a Vodafone customer they thought this would be straight forward and were really looking forward to getting their hands on a phone that should have been out a few weeks ago. Not so, although the phone is available to pre-order on the vodafone.co.uk website unfortunately that’s only for new customers. Existing customers will only be able to order the phone after May 5th when Vodafone has the phone in stock and knows what its going to charge for it.

A little surprising given that Vodafone have decided which tier the phone will be in and even when the customer threatened to go to O2 and get an iphone, the customer care agent still couldnt do anything for the customer. How frustrating.

If Vodafone are planning on putting new customers first for all new handset releases as they did with the Blackberry Storm and as it sounds like they are doing with the HTC Magic then the company is neglecting the cheaper customer and risks increased churn levels. New customers are expensive to acquire and are very much an unknown entity where as Telco’s have a far greater insight into existing customers spend patterns. In this example the customer is chasing the operator asking to be signed up for another 18month plan on a more expensive monthly tariff.