Crisis management storm brewing for O2

April 17th, 2008 by Wendy McAuliffe

O2 is not faring well in the press or public eye at the moment with its blunders over 3G speeds, and PR gaffe where it called readers of The Register “techie nerds”… and I’m about to make matters worse for them!

I’m unfortunate enough to be an O2 customer. My Blackberry is my lifeline. So when my data connection went dead yesterday morning, I phoned O2 up to see what was going on.

The customer service person I spoke to knew “exactly what was going on” before I’d described the problem, which was enough to get the alarm bells ringing.

I was then informed that O2 had moved to a new billing system over the past couple of days, and that all my tariff details had been lost. There was no record of the fact that I was a Blackberry user, had a data tariff, or the number of minutes or texts I received each month. Hence the reason for my Blackberry saying “data connection refused” for the past couple of days.

I was asked to describe my tariff so that the problem could be manually corrected! I’ve been promised that my data bolt-on will be reconnected tomorrow.

In true O2 style there was no apology, no offer of compensation for the impact this might have had on my business, and no explanation.

So in true social media style, I’m breaking the story here!

The new billing system has been implemented across O2′s entire customer base, so I’m guessing if you haven’t picked up on a problem yet, you will when your next bill arrives! I’d love to hear how O2 iPhone customers have been affected.

The final irony in the tale is that when the post arrived later today, I had a letter from O2 about the new billing system, entitled “a change for the better”!

      

Tags: crisis management, mobile, O2, PR, reputation management

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 17th, 2008 at 5:02 pm and is filed under Blog, PR, Social media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.