Steve Fenton

<< May | June | July >>

Friday, 11th June 2010

I am currently in the process of moving home and I don't have an Internet connection (and won't for another week or two). This has seemed like a bit of a problem as each time I've encountered a problem, my first thought was to search online for a solution.

Whether it was a broken appliance, the need to hire a van at short notice, wanting to view furniture or even to sort out bank balances - my thought process was to get online and start searching for information. Without any way of doing this, I have resorted to strange combination of techniques. One of the techniques was to go old-school and phone people up. On the whole this is much more time-consuming that performing the same task on the Internet, but I did discover something interesting - you may actually get a better deal on the phone than you can get online.

In the brief window of opportunity I had today to utilise the internet (and write this post) I checked to see how much I could have saved by setting various services up online rather than by telephone and I was surprised to find that I had got a better deal on the phone than I could get on the web. In one instance, I had actually saved £380 because I had telephoned instead of buying online. That's not a small amount of money.

So what does this mean? Has the convenience of the Internet led to a premium price tag? Well, not in all cases. What it does seem to suggest is that you can find cheap products online, but for services (gas, electric, telephone, satellite television, finance) you might be better off picking up the telephone and talking to a real person. It may take a few minutes more, but you could save some serious amounts of money.