Not wanting to isolate one brand in particular, but needing a solid case study I propose Coditel. I want to explain the impact of social media and its connection to the importance of search engines.
Coditel provide cable and telephony services in Belgium but mainly in the Brussels Region. There are people who are unhappy with the service they provide and some of the techniques they employ. My own frustration was when they removed BBC2 from our subscription saying that there was a need to upgrade to the digital service to get it back… I said nothing but happened upon a post from Peter Forret who was analysing some of their channel choices. I commented on the blog explaining my situation. Now two things are interesting about this blog post.
1. There have been 13 comments and in the main they are negative (one positive comment). They are also over a long period of time, it seems that people are coming across the post through search engines and not necessarily because they are coming regularly to Peter’s blog. This is a beautiful focus group on the experiences clients are having with them.
2. If you go to Google and type the word Coditel, the 4th web site is the blog post. Even better the text Google chooses is my comment. (I guess Google isn’t good enough to know it is me searching…). There is a good chance that people coming to the site will see this post.
Impact for Coditel:
Well if they aware of these issues then they have a way to communicate how they will address it. Based on some search statistics I have access to it seems that 1,000 people search for Coditel every year. These are not massive numbers but when people do the search they will come across the brand in a very negative way and given the increase in word-of-mouth driven by web it cannot be good. I expect they are having problems dealing with a transition to their new services. There are a very large number of unhappy clients who talk of customer service that don’t answer or even worse extremely long queues at their offices in Brussels. I know all of this because I have found connections to it on the web.
As there is little choice of providers in Brussels, Coditel may decide to do nothing. If I was a shareholder this would be worrying if longer term brand value means anything to them. I would suggest they reach out to consumers with higher investment in customer service. Furthermore they should instigate a comprehensive online outreach campaign where they explain where they stand and communicate with their unhappy stakeholders…