I'm following Telstra's My Telstra Experience initiative. I didn't plan to update every day, but perhaps I will have to as it has a certain momentum in the social media world even though it is a closed survey panel.
Unfortunately the first big media exposure was a complete FAIL.
The whole mess is written up here "Hold the phoney: Telstra’s 'customer' unmasked", and you just have to ask what WERE they thinking???
Excuse my disparaging language but how did they think that bringing in a PR hack to a nightly current affairs show posing as a former disgruntled customer was ever going to work in this day and age?
You can see from the comments on the article exposing this that it has really just pulled the rug out of Telstra's efforts to convince people that My Telstra Experience was anything but yet another PR stunt. That bit is not being derogatory that's just stating the facts as revealed in the comments - universally negative.
If we think about some of the tenets of not just social media, but also customer relations, we think of openness, transparency, disclosure, and perhaps even honesty!
In posing their PR hack as a customer Telstra failed transparency, failed openness, failed to be honest, and of course failed in disclosure. I mean this was utter contempt for the public and and a complete and utter FAIL. It's hard to go on because it is just such a complete exposure of the potentially PR-based thinking behind the whole My Telstra Experience.
Time will tell whether this IS a fatal blow, right out of the gate. The campaign was less than one week old!
As for my own "Telstra Experience", since I am interested and also a mobile phone and a landline customer, I went to sign up. My experience hit a brick wall at the first step as my browser choked on the very first page. I have all the latest Flash etc, just updated them the other day, but it couldn't break the registration system. That's just a small UI hiccup as thousands have registered, but it stopped me.
In related news Perth Now published a "Memo to David Thodey: here's what your Telstra customers want fixed" after asking for comments from its readers.
...since Telstra put out the call yesterday for customers to tell the struggling telco how to fix its woeful customer service, our readers have scrambled to join the queue. Perthnow.com.au readers ripped into Australia's big telco, slamming it for a complete lack of care, having staff who can't speak English, and of being "too far gone to fix". Instead of getting answers, Telstra got brickbats. Only a few readers gave helpful advice. Rex wasn't one of them, emailing us with: "Their prices - even with their new ones - are between 'not competitive' to 'an outright ripoff'," he said. Telstra this week admitted it didn't know how to fix its woeful service standards, so it called on customers to tell it how to do it.
There's no shortage of people with a willingness to comment. The question remains open - how willing Telstra to listen and to act and to be seen to be acting in good faith?
