Brands’ identity

Every so often I interact with a brand through Twitter, and every time I end up disappointed. My most recent deflating experience is with BT – but don’t misunderstand me here. I’m not convinced that any big brand really gets how to interact with customers through Twitter because I’m coming to the conclusion that social networks are in many ways the antithesis of what most big organisations are these days.

Over the past four days my house has been without landline phone or broadband. There was apparently a theft of cabling nearby, and a stack of houses in the area have been left disconnected as a result. On BT’s general service information there has been a message saying that the service will be resolved at 2pm tomorrow, up until around midday when the day of fix is shifted forward 24 hours. Tomorrow, truly, never comes; the problem with this sort of information is that it is useless having three times been changed on what appears to be in a systematic, automated way. Our contingency plans (my wife works from home, so no broadband or phone is a big issue) have been blown out of the water based on the information we were being provided.

Yesterday, partly through frustration with the traditional customer service channels (call centre systems from hell, useless information on the website) and partly through my inherent sense of mischievousness, I sent out a couple of tweets mentioning the BT Twitter account @BT_UK:

Day 3 of no phone or data service at home in Teddington – will @BT_UK give us some sort of rebate?

and

Dear @BT_UK. Publishing an estimated fix time of 2pm tomorrow, and then shifting it to the day after at 12 noon every day isn’t very helpful

Six hours later I saw this:

@ballantine70 @BTCare will be ale to look into what is happening with the fix of your services.

The Twitter equivalent of “Press 1 to enter into a spiral of despair, Press 2 to hear the options again”.

And herein lies the issue, as I see it, that big organisations have when they enter into the social media world: you can’t just use it as an additional channel to customer service on the old models. On a social network, I’m looking for interaction, not just to be routed into your labyrinthine systems and processes.

A few months ago I was dismayed to see that another Telco that I personally use, Orange, had a Twitter account called @Orange_noreply. Today there is an honesty about this that maybe is a bit more honest that the one that others are taking (although weirdly the short description of the Orange account claims “Orange moderation account handled by real people not robot 🙂 “. Would I be happier if the brands that I interact with had no presence at all on social networks? Or if they were a little more blunt and explicitly said “Stop trying to jump our helpdesk queues”? I don’t know.

What I do know, though, is that the old models of organisation, the system-centric, process-driven, Taylorist-inspired behemoths jar horribly when they try to put a social media front end onto them.

I’ve been reading through IBM’s 2011 Global Chief Marketing Officer research findings in the past couple of days, and one of the salient findings was that “social media” is one of the top four things that keeps the majority of CMOs awake at night: they know it’s important, and they generally feel ill-equipped to deal with it. Most CMOs, though, also want to be able to engage in meaningful conversations with their customers, and social networks are surely a way to be able to do this. The CMO challenge, though, as for much in the digital space is that they alone don’t “own” the social media channels, and so the conversation spreads across many functions within the organisation. That “conversation” becomes tortuous for the customer when functional departments only own certain parts of it…

I’m not saying BT are particularly bad at this – I’m sure my own organisation shows similar internal organisational structures manifested in it’s external social network presence; my guess with the two BT accounts is the the BT_UK one is owned by marketing, and the BTCare one is owned by the customer service organisation. For me as an individual, wanting to have a conversation with an individual, it doesn’t feel much like they do “care”, though…