Posts Tagged ‘O2’
O2 engages with customers through Twitter
November 4th, 2008
Hats off to O2 - after years of getting its telephone customer service completely wrong, it’s finally doing a great job of engaging with disgruntled online customers.
Yesterday, in a moment of exasperation, I Tweeted the following about my mobile provider (after being on hold to O2 for 40 minutes):
“wendymcauliffe: O2 truly has the worst customer service I’ve ever encountered. Every time I need to contact them my blood pressure rockets!”
A couple of minutes later, I received the following reply:
“hellojp: @wendymcauliffe Hi there, I work for O2 and saw your tweet - anything I can help with?”
After briefing describing my predicament, I promptly received another reply:
“hellojp: @wendymcauliffe Oh no, not ideal! Definitely not what we’d be aiming for - sorry you had such a hard time! Did you get your problem fixed?”
The O2 representative then went on to give me his personal email address, so that I could email him with the details of my enquiry which he has promised to handle today.
I’m not sure who’s behind O2’s adoption of Twitter, but this is definitely a step in the right direction, and something that all public service companies should be doing. While there are still big improvements to be made with O2’s telephone customer service, it’s great to see them engaging with customers online in such a timely fashion.
It will be interesting to see how my case is dealt with today!
Crisis management storm brewing for O2
April 17th, 2008
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”!