LessFuss Design

Last month I made the catastrophic decision to change my phone & broadband provider. I wouldn’t recommend it if you want to keep your marbles where they are. After several weeks of poor service and poorer communication from my new provider, it was as a result of venting my frustration on social media that I managed to get all the issues resolved, which leads me to one conculsion. If you’re getting poor service, vent on Twitter and someone from their Marketing team, fire-fighting in the name of brand protection, will probably come to your rescue.

I was only trying to make things easier…

To say the experience was like pulling teeth would be something of an understatement – it was more like pulling my jaw through my mouth. Everyone has customer service horror stories so I won’t bore you with the full details, but here it is in a nutshell:

Because they offered a great deal for local calls (the majority of the calls in our household are to local numbers), I opted for TalkTalk’s Essentials Package . Now I’m no expert, but I would have imagined that an essential part of any Essentials Phone & Broadband Package was to be able to use the phone. Evidently not. For nearly three weeks we weren’t able to make outgoing calls on our phone. On top of that, due to a ‘database error’ (they meant database administrator‘s error, surely), I didn’t get hold of the wireless router and login details until a week after my new broadband connection had gone live. So much for a smooth handover.

Route one: phone

To sort out this absolute shower, my first course of action was to call them. In fact I called on at least four separate occasions, each time being palmed handed off to someone else, each time spending at least 10 minutes on hold (listening to Neon bloody Rainbows over and over again), each time having to explain the issue over and over again. Bear in mind that since I couldn’t call on my landline (which would normally be free for TalkTalk customers), these calls were made on my mobile – costing me over £14 in total.

Eventually I lost my rag, called TalkTalk a bunch of buffoons (or something similar) (and if they were recording that conversation for monitoring and training purposes, I’d just love to hear it back) and hung up.

Route two: online contact/email

To be honest I had very low expectations of this method from the beginning. Looking at the online form, it had ‘Know what? When you cick on Submit nobody’s even going to read it’ written all over it. I was wrong though – I did get an email response to my reporting the phone line issue. Only it came a week later, and by then things had escalated somewhat…

Route three: the jugular

Shortly after my final phone conversation with TalkTalk Customer Services I did what anyone with an axe to grind and a Twitter account would do. I tweeted something unpleasant about my new provider .

I suspect at the back of my mind was the thought that someone from TalkTalk would be scouring the social web for any mention by disgruntled customers, and that’s exactly what happened. Within a day I got this tweet:

@AndyDBryant @therealjrod13 We’re here if you need us.
TalkTalkTips

(Like me, @therealjrod13 had also vented his frustration on Twitter …)

What followed was a brief  Twitter dialogue between myself and @TalkTalkTips, describing the problem (255 characters? Come on) and passing over account details, and before I knew it my issue had been assigned to a Senior Customer Services representative, who was promptly on the phone promising swift justice.

From then on, once my sorry little phone line misdemeanour was a performance target for a senior representative rather than an irritation for a Customer Service operator somewhere in Asia, I knew we’d broken the back of the problem.

Please don’t damage my brand

Much of this is of little surprise to anyone I’m sure. It’s no surprise that I had an issue with a provider – and on that score, I’d say TalkTalk are probably no better or worse than other providers (though admittedly they’ve got off to a bad start with me). No surprise they were less than effective responding to it. No surprise that eventually someone got around to taking it seriously and fixing it.

What is a surpirse, to me at least, is that the only way in which I got anyone to sit up and take notice was to badmouth the company on Twitter. The regular customer service routes failed, so I spoke my mind to a group of followers on a social network – and within days the company were onto the fix.

I suspect the reason for this lies in the way Twitter is currently being used by businesses. There are many companies out there who are using Twitter (and other social media) to provide good customer service. There are also many Twitter accounts manned by marketing teams who are perpetually crawling the web for the disaffected customers ready to give them a verbal beating.

Once they’ve found these customers, they move swiftly and decisively, and the intention is clear: we’ll fix your problem, and we’ll fix it faster than if you try another method of communication with us, but we’ll do it not because we believe in offering you good customer service, but because we can’t have you slinging dirt at us across the social web. We’ll sort your problem, now please be nice to us.

As the social web matures and the brand guardians gain a better understanding of how it works, I suspect Twitter will become more like the existing, established methods of communication between customers and businesses. That is, you may have to wait longer for an answer, you may be passed between several accounts to get an answer, or you may not get an answer at all.

But in the meantime, if you’re having a customer service nightmare like mine, my best advice is to go and rant about your service supplier on Twitter. You might find they’ll fall over themselves to help.