When Customer Care... cares!

James Whatley, of SpinVox fame, who has a weekly editorial on SMS Text News, has recently encountered a rather interesting Customer Support/Care issue (even if I think "Customer Support" is more widely used, I very much wanted to use "Customer Care" in the title, I guess the why is obvious, however I will refer to it as "CS" in this post from now on).

The whole saga is brilliantly described in his initial post, and the follow-up to that.
Make sure you read his posts before continuing to read this piece, since I'm going to give you my personal take on the extremely rapid response he got.

Now this has created heated arguments across the web, and especially on Jaiku (where Mr. Whatley lives, more or less). The thing on everyone's mind seems to be (well, after congratulating him for having it fixed so quickly) that if this would have happened to a normal user, to someone not able to reach thousands of people through a mobile-related site, things would have been totally different.

I do, in a way, agree with these assertions.

BUT.

This has always been the case with most multi-national, multi-million-dollar-making corporations. At some point, the company becomes so huge that certain things start not to work as they should. Add to that the growing trend of outsourcing, and trouble will definitely make its way into the customers' lives sooner rather than later. The many many rules that all employees of such a corporation must follow (even in the CS field) usually have the stupid effect that the the CS people you talk to are like robots. They keep repeating the same thing(s) over and over again (even if , for example, they're talking about a device that simply does not exist), flexibility of thought seems to be lost completely.

I think it's safe to say we've all had our issues with our operators. And in certain cases, while trying to fix those issues by a call to CS, we've ended up wasting lots of time and not actually being able to fix anything.

So. Yes it's true. Had it been the average Joe complaining to Vodafone, and not James Whatley, he definitely would not have received a new device within hours. But that's not the point. What James Whatley's posts did, besides making someone from Vodafone call him a few hours later to get things fixed, was make Vodafone aware of the issue. Something an average Joe could probably not have done even if he called CS a hundred times.

And this is only to the benefit of the average Joe. It is highly likely that the right people at Vodafone now know of that particular issue, and will do all that they can to fix it. So when average Joe has the same problem, things will work out smoothly, the way they should have when Mr. Whatley called CS the first time.

It's a clear win-win situation, in my opinion. And it only proves the power that bloggers now have. I wish more and more bloggers would do exactly what James Whatley did, complain out in the open, so that stupid issues like this get fixed as soon as possible. Information is everything, and corporations seem to be learning that traditional sources of information, while still powerful, are beginning to fade out. Subjective journalism (which is what blogging is, according to me at least) is here to stay. If you are a blogger, go ahead, post whatever bothers you with such corporations and their products or services. Even if they don't immediately do anything about it, at least you'll be sure that they know. And trust me, if they care at all about their brand, they will do something. Otherwise, their competition will surely step in. Look, Mr. Whatley is now sticking with Vodafone, whereas had they not fixed that mess, he probably wouldn't have.

That's what I call a PR win for Vodafone, and a great win for all their customers.

By the way, if you live in the US, UK, Canada, France, Germany, South Africa or Spain, do give SpinVox a try. You'll become addicted in no time. I won't tell you what it's all about yet (a detailed post is on the way), all you need to know is on their website. It's one of those things that will make you ask yourself how you've been able to live without it.

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