Free Guide: What Everybody Ought to Know About Effective Cellbreaking

Posted on March 12, 2014 by Jon Colgan

What’s CellBreaker’s secret sauce? How do we break contracts and squash ETFs with military precision? This is it–what we know that you don’t (but after reading this, you will). It’s called #cellbreaking.

The first secret is separation. At CellBreaker, we’ve separated the two essential functions of #cellbreaking into two services: the Break Analysis and the Breaker. The Break Analysis performs the detection function, while the Breaker actually gets you out of your contract. We owe the Breaker’s 100% success rate to this separation, because it allows us to qualify prospects before granting them access to the Breaker. Why is this important?

The second secret is constraint. The Breaker is not designed to help in every type of situation; there are only three categorical pain points the Breaker fits:

1. Price increases
2. Terms changes
3. Performance deficiency

These are the most common root causes of consumer frustration. We consider each of these three events actionable and–most importantly–supportable with data. So, we constrained the Breaker’s design to only fit these. Every other event we encounter is filtered out, not granted access to the Breaker. This reduces variability of outcome to an impressive degree. For example, as mentioned before, the Breaker has a 100% success rate, and the turnaround time is a precise seven days. Compare that to the many horror stories consumers tell every week in online forums about their experiences trying to win against cell phone carriers on their own. A model to follow these stories are not. Consumers value predictability, something so rare in standing up to big carriers, and the Breaker’s constraint offers that.

The third secret is confidence. It pays to be right; but as carriers know, it also pays to convince your opponent that you’re right even when you’re not. Carriers try to illustrate this point every time a customer leaves. By default, the carrier will levy an early termination fee (ETF).This is a systematic reflex not to the substance of why a customer left–for legitimate reason or not–but by sheer virtue of the fact that he was a customer and then he wasn’t. If a carrier can convince you that you owe them money, they win, whether you owe them money or not.

“Wait, are you saying that carriers often allege bills that customers don’t actually owe?” Yes. Carriers send bills whether they’re owed or not for a few reasons:

1. Most people don’t like conflict. So, they might pay the alleged bill whether they feel they owe it or not.
2. Most people aren’t confident in their position. So, even if someone made it as far as objecting in writing, a forceful carrier response couched in legalese might make you doubt the position you worked so hard to put together, the one you were confident in.
3. Sending a bill gives carriers a kind of leverage that consumers don’t have: carriers can make consumers fear for their financial reputation by threatening to report unpaid bills to credit agencies. Consumers have no such recourse.

But what underlies CellBreaker’s confidence? How does CellBreaker squash ETFs that carriers allege? By negating each of these three vulnerabilities that individual, self-advocating consumers have, we make carriers give up the charade; and we do it every time. Here’s how.

First, we don’t mind conflict. We shield our customers from the inconvenience of having to prosecute their position by preparing the appropriate response to whatever correspondence the carrier sends. All the customer must do is hit the send button when needed. This is how we force the carrier to burn more man-hours than the customer, making it economically imprudent for the carrier to continue its allegation.

Second, we can’t be rattled. Our confidence in the position we’ve prescribed you arises from the quality of expertise on which our system is built and from our 100% success rate. We’ve never had a customer whose alleged ETF we did not squash. To the individual, self-advocating consumer, carrier arguments along the way could appear very convincing. But to us, they’re just canned statements that lack both force and basis in the facts of each given case. When matched against an opponent equally well-versed in this area, the carrier doesn’t really have a winnable position; they know this and always eventually acknowledge it by giving up.

Third, we remind carriers that they’re not allowed to make idle threats. The threat of tarnishing a consumer’s credit can be an effective one, especially when that threat is idle and made behind closed doors; because idle threats don’t cost the carrier money to pursue and secret threats aren’t likely to come to the attention of legal experts who know that idle threats regarding debt collections are illegal under state and federal Fair Debt Collections Practices Acts. When carriers strong-arm individual consumers in this way, no one ever hears about it, and they’re not held accountable for potential violations of these laws. By contrast, when carriers threaten our customers, our response makes them pee their pants. Like clockwork, carriers raise the white flag and rescind the alleged ETFs only days later. This consistency of results is the fundamental basis for our confidence.

Lastly, #cellbreaking is best done by software. Whereas individual consumers with whom I’ve spoken burned anywhere from 20-50 man-hours fighting their own fight–and often not even getting the resolution they sought–our customers spend about 10-20 minutes keeping in touch with CellBreaker and hitting the send button when needed. So, it’s a fight; but we fight the fight for you. You, on the other hand, can enjoy the show with some skittles and popcorn, if you like.

The legal process that CellBreaker automates is not something we invented or even dictate. It’s older than your grandpa and is thus well-established. At bottom, its the established procedure for objecting to a breach of contract. The handful of nuances specific to cell phone contracts derive from a finite body of laws and the contract itself. The key insight is that the logic of law parallels the logic of computers. So, we distilled the relevant laws down to elements and transcribed them into computer logic. This is how CellBreaker can consistently beat carriers, squash ETFs, and do it efficiently.

The takeaway is this: cellbreaking is about following a prescription pursuant to your carrier’s terms of service (TOS). So , in every case, we identify an actionable event and object to it in writing within the prescribed window of time. If your carrier does not cure the event–again, pursuant to the TOS–then you have defensible grounds for terminating without an ETF; and once you terminate, 7 days after stating your position in writing, you will have already won, regardless of how readily or reluctantly your carrier accepts defeat.