Virgin Mobile USA has taken the interesting precaution of guaranteeing it’s customers bill payments for them if they lose their jobs. Under the “Pink Slip Protection” plan, if you become unemployed and are eligible for welfare, Virgin will pay your mobile bill for you for three months. All it requires is that you’ve been with Virgin on a monthly plan for at least two months – including pre-paid monthly plans.
To go along with this, Virgin also has two new payment plan announcements. The first is a price reduction on it’s Totally Unlimited Calling plan. The contractless, pre-paid plan is $49.99 a month. For that, you get unlimited talk time to anywhere within the states, with no roaming charges.
It’s also launched a plan specifically for texters – 1000 messages for $14.99/month, or unlimited texts and messaging for $19.99. The unlimited plan also includes IM, email and MMS. This plan does include voice, at 10c per minute anytime.
From the release:
“With a great selection of high quality, affordable handsets, Virgin Mobile USA offers consumers unparalleled value,” said Dan Schulman, CEO, Virgin Mobile USA. “New network rates obtained from Sprint, which go into effect immediately, allow us to pass value back to the consumer and open a new addressable market for us at the $49.99 unlimited level. This offer allows us to effectively compete in the market and we believe will help to further improve our financial performance. With the unemployment rate rising, the fear of job loss or salary reductions have made consumers watch every dollar. These issues tend to impact our prepaid base more than many wireless users, so we hope this program can offer some peace of mind to our customer… We take the Virgin role as customer champion very seriously, and hope this is another way our customers can ‘Take Advantage of Virgin Mobile.’ The role of your cell phone becomes even more essential when you are networking and Pink Slip Protection can mean retaining all the benefits and flexibility of your wireless plan when you need to stay ‘connected’”
What we think?
This is a lot better than the last pricing plan we saw from Virgin, which was their awful data plan. Although you could add that data plan to your Unlimited Texting package, if you really wanted to make your texting package worse.
I’m actually fairly impressed with the Pinkslip Protection. It’s an imaginative way to make your customers happier with you, and it’s a good value-added service. Much as I complain about Virgin’s data prices, it’s really the only plan that it has gotten wrong. For talking and texting, it’s a pretty good operator to be with. In the US, at least.
