Ultimately, TR can chose any way they want to announce a price increase, and any timing for that.
I think the biggest misstep here is the way this change happened (more specifically was/was not announced).
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Whether they mean to or not, they effectively set a precedent for their company with the early notification of the price increase last September.
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They knowingly announced the price change early on the forum, Facebook, and podcast.
- They even encouraged users to “take advantage” of the opportunity to join the service at the current “low” rate and lock that in with their grandfather pricing policy.
- Right or wrong… intentional or not, that set the bar and expectations of future price changes from users.
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Probably more surprising to me is that the notification for this price change came in a 3rd reply to a customer complaint on the forum.
- It’s 24 hours after the apparent price change, and I still have not seen what I would term an “official” announcement. No email, no forum post in the “Announcements” section, no press release… nothing.
- The only knowledge of this was driven from, and continued in a forum thread. A thread that could be unnoticed by a fair number of people (even if they are members here).
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Even as they chose to not offer a pre-warning (which could be argued either way), I still think an “official” declaration of the price change on the actual date of release (apparently yesterday morning) in various forms (email current subscribers, forum post in the appropriate section, and press release to the main indoor training/cycling world sites) would have been appropriate.
- As it stands, we have clear statements from Nate here, so we know we are getting good info. But the appearance is a reaction to a customer complaint, along with the heated discussion about the change in light of the points above.
- This type of thread was bound to happen with this change, even in the best of circumstances. However, there is a distinct difference in proactively stating a change (official TR statement in a primary resource), and handling the repercussions of that vs what we have here.
It’s a black eye for a company that set a pretty high bar for customer relations and notifications in the past. Change is hard… and sometimes, the way that change is handled matters as much as the change itself.