The BBC recently wrote a piece about social media and airing your gripes with companies in the public domain.
People who know me, know I use Twitter quite a lot and a number of these Tweets are directed at companies or organisations I'm not happy with. Though there are a number of positive ones too.
The article did get me thinking: yes I'm getting replies to my Tweets and quickly too (fifteen minutes for Virgin Money to reply yesterday) but do the responses have any substance to them?
Once again it looks like the big corporations are faceless and full of corporate bull shit. Take the exchange with Virgin Money below:
They don't actually say anything do they? No explanation as to why my ISA rate has dropped twice in the past few months, just batted me away. Somebody somewhere in VM's head office can strike my mention off as dealt with. Hope you get your bonus AD as I'm sure it's coming from my lower interest rate!
Tesco and Transport for Greater Manchester are others who Tweet a lot but say nothing, are you seeing a trend here? Replies are meaningless corporate speak so any outsider will see mentions have been dealt with, or at the very least replied to.
What I have found is that smaller organisations tend to have a more personal responses. I Tweeted Oldham Council it took them a couple of hours to get back to me but they had put a call into the appropriate department to get an answer for me.
I've come to the conclusion that complaining via social media is in the most part gets little or no meaningful response from the "big boys" because it's just a group of faceless graduates on £18k a year dealing with hundreds of mentions. They must have stock responses for every occasion.
The smaller organisations take the time to reply with some thought, it might take them longer but I'd rather have a reply in a day that is useful than one in five minutes that says nothing. The problem is in this day and age everything has to be now.
Is this going to stop me Tweeting the big boys and letting them and the world know what I think? No because I might be Tweeting at the company but for the most part I'm more concerned that the rest of the world knows what I think of these organisations.
People who know me, know I use Twitter quite a lot and a number of these Tweets are directed at companies or organisations I'm not happy with. Though there are a number of positive ones too.
The article did get me thinking: yes I'm getting replies to my Tweets and quickly too (fifteen minutes for Virgin Money to reply yesterday) but do the responses have any substance to them?
Once again it looks like the big corporations are faceless and full of corporate bull shit. Take the exchange with Virgin Money below:
They don't actually say anything do they? No explanation as to why my ISA rate has dropped twice in the past few months, just batted me away. Somebody somewhere in VM's head office can strike my mention off as dealt with. Hope you get your bonus AD as I'm sure it's coming from my lower interest rate!
Tesco and Transport for Greater Manchester are others who Tweet a lot but say nothing, are you seeing a trend here? Replies are meaningless corporate speak so any outsider will see mentions have been dealt with, or at the very least replied to.
What I have found is that smaller organisations tend to have a more personal responses. I Tweeted Oldham Council it took them a couple of hours to get back to me but they had put a call into the appropriate department to get an answer for me.
I've come to the conclusion that complaining via social media is in the most part gets little or no meaningful response from the "big boys" because it's just a group of faceless graduates on £18k a year dealing with hundreds of mentions. They must have stock responses for every occasion.
The smaller organisations take the time to reply with some thought, it might take them longer but I'd rather have a reply in a day that is useful than one in five minutes that says nothing. The problem is in this day and age everything has to be now.
Is this going to stop me Tweeting the big boys and letting them and the world know what I think? No because I might be Tweeting at the company but for the most part I'm more concerned that the rest of the world knows what I think of these organisations.
Hi Dan
ReplyDeleteHaving spotted your blog post, I hope you don't mind me responding here to clarify the situation.
At Virgin Money we keep a look out for issues and do what we can to help our customers when they have questions.
As you point out in your blog post, we do aim to reply quickly with accurate information although there's not always enough room in the 140 characters twitter allows.
When your tweet arrived in our feed, Amy, who tweets as ^AD, picked it up and saw you were looking to leave us.
We don't employ a box ticking mentality to answer and move on. We're here to chat things through, or if there's more to say/do than twitter can sensibly accommodate, happy to correspond via email.
To give you more context regarding your ISA rate. We look to protect our savings customers from the prevailing low interest rate environment as much as we can. You may have noticed that many other savings providers have reduced rates or, in some instances, withdrawn products completely.
We don't take you for granted as a customer, and that's why we've ensured the new rate on your ISA remains competitive in the current marketplace.
Whilst I understand you are not happy, hopefully this helps to explain the change in your savings rate.
Kind regards,
Antony
Head of Social Media
Virgin Money