O2 miss chance to enhance their brand

I have O2 to thank for my first ever live TV appearance.. after Sky News picked up my blog about O2's poor communication following their network failure last Thursday. When asked about the possibility of brand damage, I said the key was O2's actions in the coming days.

So, 1 week on, and what has happened?

Well, most importantly, O2 fixed the problem fast, with the network back up in 24 hours. So, well done to them for sorting out the technical nightmare quickly. As a result, the brand damage to O2 will probably be limited, especially as this is a relatively low interest category, and up to now O2 has offered pretty good service. Most people will have forgotten about the issue when they come to re-new their contract.

But what about O2 showing they are sorry through a bold action, which is what I recommended O2 should do? I quoted in the Sky interview the example of Apple offering a free case to anyone that had reception problems with the iPhone 4, as I posted on here.

Well, a full week went by without a whisper from O2 to me and its millions of other customers. Not a text. Not an email. Not a call. Nothing. And this for a company is faster of the mark then Usain Bolt when it comes to texting me about going over my data limit and telling me how big my bill will be.

Then finally today I got a text saying "Thanks for bearing with us over the network disruption" and offering £10 to spend in an O2 shop from September 1. Well, it is something, and £10 is OK. But again, for a company who spent millions on ads saying "We're better connected", I think O2 has performed poorly:

- A week is way too long to talk to me

- I'm flabbergasted that they didn't actually say sorry for all the hassle

- Why do I have to wait till Sep 1st to redeem my offer? Over 5 weeks seems a long time to wait. Perhaps this is a craft move to reduce redemptions and save them money?

- I have to spend it using "Priority Moments". What the bloody hell are they?

Net, I don't think O2 have damaged their brand. But I do think they've missed an opportunity to slightly enhance their brand. Most people get that things will go wrong with technology. Just think about the problems you have setting up your home internet for example. Now, times this by 20 million and you've got the size of challenge faced by a company like O2.

But O2 were crap at communicating with customers last week when the problem happened (no update on home-page, no text or email update, phone lines engaged). And they've coninued to be crap since. Their apology, or rather thankyou, has been late in coming and under-whelming.

They had a chance to act quickly and boldly, for example with an app like Apple did, where you could buy a free £10 gift from O2. And if they'd done that, perhaps people would have been pleasantly surprised and actually talked about it.

In conclusion, in today's complex world, for service brands its not a question of IF you're going to have a technical problem, but rather WHEN. Having a plan worked out in advance about how you will communicate and act when the inevtibe nightmare happend could help you protect your brand and maybe even enhance it a bit.

 

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Hi David
Thanks for your views. It’s all useful feedback. As one of our customers, we are sorry you were affected. We are also sorry you felt we didn’t communicate enough during the network outage.

For the record, here is more information on what we did to keep our customers informed.

Our network status page was continually updated during the outage. This is the place online where customers can check to see if there are any current network issues at any given time.
Once it became apparent that the network outage was severe, we supplemented this with a message on the front page of our website and also a blog post which gave more detailed information. We updated both of these sources regularly. In addition we kept our Twitter followers and Facebook fans updated as more information became available.

During the period when service was being restored we publicly made a commitment to make it up to our customers. Our Chief Executive, Ronan Dunne said this live on Sky TV, and repeated personally on Twitter, which was shared by @o2 as well. It took some time to identify which customers were directly affected, but once we had gathered that information, we were able to confirm to those customers what they would receive from us.

The issue we had was unprecedented. Despite being able to restore service in 24 hours, it takes time to complete the next step of providing the goodwill to those customers affected. Sorry again that you were affected. Rest assured we have been doing everything we can to ensure it doesn’t happen again.

Finally – if you haven't tried Priority Moments yet, we'd encourage you to join the millions of other O2 customers who have. It's just for O2 customers, and brings you exclusive offers from High Street favourites, and just launched this week, local independent businesses too. O2 customers have saved over £8m from over 300 brands in the last year alone using it.

O2 Social Media Team

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