If you get your business mobile phones through a dealer then it’s worth checking the small print for early termination charges!

Sometimes for perfectly legitimate reasons you’d like to end a mobile phone contract early. You might have ten phones out of contract, two with three months still to go and one with six months left. You’d like to neaten things up by having all the phones on one contract with one end date. Mobile networks will calculate a ‘buy out’ cost based on the tariff and the number of days left. All perfectly sensible.

Some dealers, however, will hide additional charges in their own Terms and Conditions. We came across one company recently who would have been charged £250 per phone to end a contract early, regardless of how many days were left. That’s clearly not an administration charge – that’s a penalty.

Surely it makes more sense to lock in a customer with great customer service which they can’t do without, rather than impose penalty charges? If a customer wants to move dealer then presumably the relationship has already broken down. At Simpatico we would never charge a customer to move away from us. Sadly this sort of charge is quite common in the telecoms industry – is it in yours?