• Wall Street Journal, Thursday, January 22, 2009 10:45 AM

Savvy customers are taking advantage of marketers' desires to hold on to their current customers by negotiating lower rates on everything from phone bills to ... well, cable bills, Vishesh Kumar reports. Can other products and services be far behind?

Consumers are finding that negotiating with cable and phone companies may present a more direct route to saving on communications services costs than switching to cheaper prepaid cell phone plans or using Web-enabled mobile devices to connect to the Internet. And companies are often happy to make deals with customers, Kumar writes, particularly if they can poach them from rivals.

"The key is to hang on to every possible customer right now," admits Alex Dudley, a spokesman for Time Warner Cable. "They are our lifeblood."

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