If you are to engage, engage meaningfully

I recently had the joy of dealing with BSKYB over a fault with my phone line. Let's just say their customer services folk haven't covered themselves in glory. I mean you'd think if someone booked an appointment with BT they'd bother to actually tell BT they've booked it....in fact how can you book an appointment without telling the people you are booking it with. Oh dear I'm ranting again.

As well as talking to their customer service and technical folk I had a little rant on Twitter. To my surprise a customer service rep got in touch as they'd seen my tweets. They asked for my number and called me. That's pretty good I thought, at least they are responding to customers through different channels. However, all they said was we saw your tweet and have passed it on. What's the point of that? It was clear I was already in contact with customer service. They'd not even looked into my account properly.

As a PR I'm an advocate of companies monitoring Twitter to protect their reputations. But if you are going to monitor and engage in conversation then make sure you are prepared to do something about what people are saying. Or at least have access to a customer's account so you are hooked into the whole CRM process. Without this, monitoring of Twitter on occasions like this seem like a complete waste of money. All Sky succeeded in doing was to annoy me by calling and having nothing to say. The lesson: if you are to engage, engage meaningfully.  Make sure all your comms channels are integrated and make sure information is shared amongst teams in real-time.