BT holds its hands up and pays out credits

In my previous post I shared how I felt BT had got their CRM badly wrong - making an offer to current customers it then appeared reneged on. You can read the whole sorry saga here.

The very encouraging news is that after making my feelings known via twitter and blog, BT admitted it had got it wrong, said sorry, and has been brilliant at putting things right.

And for this we should heap praise. I publish this today to thank them for that - and to make sure others who received the same misleading mail-shot are empowered to benefit as I have.

Here's what BT had to say:

Having now looked into this matter in detail, I can confirm that we had two different direct mailings (DM) for Essential Extra [The extra channels and HD deal the letters promoted]. One of which was aimed at customers on our “free Vision Essential for one year” offer, and the other at customer paying the standard £5 a month for their Vision Essential subscription. 
We had an error on our mailing system that meant the latter group of customers were incorrectly sent the DM containing the claims “from just £2 more a month” and “£2 extra on top of your current TV subscription”. 
We appreciate that the overall impression of this mailing was therefore misleading for customers who are not currently paying for their Vision subscription. Please accept this letter as a sincere apology for our mistake. 
It is of the upmost importance to BT that we are clear and honest with our customers and to ensure that they are not misled by either marketing or customer service communications. We are in the process of reviewing how we target marketing communications to ensure that errors like this don’t happen again. 
We will of course honour this price point and arrange a bill credit of £60 should you sign up for Essential Extra (this being the difference of £5 per month, over the 12 month minimum term). You will therefore pay just £2 more a month, as was stated in the mailing you received. 
If you would like to go ahead with Essential Extra please let me know and I can place the order and arrange the credit for you. I hope you find this satisfactory but if you require any more help or information, please don’t hesitate to contact me.

And I have done - and the customer service team have been excellent at making sure everything has happened as it should have done.

Neil O'Shea and Colleen McElhatton from the BT Social Media Team deserve particular praise.So well done BT - it's great to hear you are reviewing how you target.

Other companies would do well to take note - getting your CRM wrong can not only annoy customers - it can end up adding hefty costs.

I've no idea how many more people will now be able to claim a £60 credit - but I'm guessing it'll be rather more than a handful.

Who did you help get value from the web today?

I get a lot of value from the internet. And I'm on the board of trustees of a national UK charity which thinks it would be fairer if everyone could understand and share in that same bounty.



Understand, share in - and contribute to.

Here's one way that those who have learned to love the web can spread their joy - and one way I hope you'll participate with and be inspired by: The BT Internet Ranger of the Year Award.

Here's the official Citizen's Online blurb: "We are looking for young people, up to the age of 16, who have (helped) other people get online. If you know a young person who has done this, you can either nominate them or encourage them to nominate themselves. We are looking to have BT Internet Ranger award winners in each of England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.

Each winner will receive an HP laptop plus £250 worth of IT vouchers, together with a certificate. A best of the national winners will receive an additional £250 worth of IT vouchers.

BT Internet Ranger Schools Award
This year, for the first time, a separate award will be made to a school or a group of schools who encourage young people, up to the age of 16, to use their skills to help other people learn about computers and how to surf the internet.  This is a "forward looking" award scheme to promote future activity rather than the more traditional "backward looking" recognition for work which has already been carried out. The winning school or group of schools will receive £5,000.

Deadline for applications: Friday 15th January 2010
Apply online:

• http://www.btinternetrangers.co.uk/Awards/BTInternetRangeroftheYear/index.htm
• http://www.btinternetrangers.co.uk/Awards/BTInternetRangersSchoolsAward/index.htm

Citizens Online is a national charity which believes participation in the digital world is a basic human right.

BT: Another example of companies from Mars, customers from Venus.

When will they learn? When we we learn?
I've just had the joy of a bill from BT (who provide my phone and broadband access at home).
It's another cracking example of the dehumanising of customer relationships that's going on at large 'scale efficencies' companies. Perhaps they are being infected by the logic of customer relationship mechanisms. Perhaps they have to think less digitally about this (by which I mean on-off) more organically (allowing choices to develop).
Here's the issue this time:
BT sends me a bill. The front page says I have a credit balance of £250 (approx). It also says that I need take no action.
I pay my bill by direct debit.
The next page shows the same £250 amount as a minus figure. Confused? Yep, me too.
And those of you who have read previous posts about the confusion companies seem to revel in creating in their customers (Dehumanising customer relationships, Sprint Nextel, and When is a Free Download not a Free Download) will know I'm not a big fan.
So I rang up. I felt the customer did need to take some action. Lucky I did.
My question was a simple one: "Please can you tell me what 'credit balance' means".
This simple question, rephrased also, for absolute clarity to: "does it mean I owe you money or that you owe me money?" was evaded a total of seven times until I asked if the person I was speaking to couldn't answer it perhaps they could pass me to someone who could?
Answers every time included a by-rote explanation of how the billing system works. That's what I mean by the digital approach.
In other words I ask a question which includes certain terms 'credit, balance' and the computer at the other end - pardon me - the human being at the other end - starts to reel off the customer script.
Turns out (after some persistance on my part) that BT owe me £250, that I am paying twice as much a month as a I should be, and that the amount they owe me is rising by the day.
I suggested that perhaps this was cause for the customer to take some action. Actually - if your customer is out of pocket to the tune of £250 and you are rifling through his pockets to get even more of his cash that you don't need on a daily basis, you might think it incumbant on the company to take some action.
'The customer relationship mechanism' clearly isn't up to dealing with customers. What it is very good at piling extra cash, that isn't BTs, into its coffers.
Not good.
I noted that the call was recorded. I thanked the person who dealt with me and asked that BT do two things (I should say, they had already by this stage agreed to refund my overpayment immediately and to cut my monthly direct debit in half... maybe I should have asked for an interest payment?)

1. State on your bills YOU OWE US "£x" or "WE OWE YOU "£X".
2. Don't tell someone you owe money - and will owe even more on a daily basis if no action is taken, that no action is required. To continue with this policy is at best a dereliction of duty.

Big business is headed in the wrong direction. As I've said before, just as their customers are finding their power at the edge, want to control from the edge, companies are centralising theirs. They are going to the centre, we are going to the edge.

Where the customer is in contact with your company you must allow them to have conversations with empowered people - not people whose only response is one governed by answering questions by rote - dictated by a CRM.

When they do this they don't listen. When they don't listen a conversation is very hard. Every market is a conversation.

There are enough clues there for BT. I'll send you my bill - see if you can work out what it means.

(The title for this post is taken from the chapter in Communities Dominate Brands, see recommended blogs, left).

BT prepares users for the future

Me-too-ism is breaking out all over around internet phone calls. Skype are the big boys? Right? Sign up and see how many people are members in your town. In Peterborough today, it's 36.

No wonder Tesco are trying to get people to buy their internet phones with the promise of free calls to other Tesco signees (that could easily hit 2 in your town). BT may be the kiddies to get this one rolling.

Their total broadband package is plugging their free internet calls and a new online/offline phone is being made available in about a month. But the plan seems to be around getting as much cash as they can before people work out that skype can be genuinely free - and everyone abandons the landlines.

Even the new BT Broadband packages may amuse anyone who can see beyond the end of their nose. I've been offered a new faster broadband to 'prepare you for the future of on-demand TV and movies'. And no doubt that will be launched at me by BT very soon. This faster broadband 'preparation' includes free wireless router AND it'll cost me £2 a month less. Great.

Except it's limited to 6GB a month. Which is more than I currently use at home... but when on-demand TV arrives... well I dare say a lot of people will be stung for additional charges before realising how they've been done up like a kipper.

Google to buy YouTube? Is 'Me too' dead?

Google's much-rumoured plans to buy YouTube raises some questions about the value of brands, established routes to market, marketing (full stop) and me-too-ism.
Why has YouTube been so much more successful than google's own video offering? Technically there is little to choose between them. And you'd have to say that google would have an advantage in route-to-market terms.
As far as I understand it (and please do correct me if I'm wrong) google video arrived on the scene approx six months after google video. Six months. All google's advantages wiped out in just six months?
Perhaps it is that google is now seen as 'establishment' - YouTube was/is the dude.
Perhaps it is this, and the way YouTube functions much more intuitively as a social network than google video, that has given it this victory.
Maybe me-tooism no longer has sustainable currency. Innovation - being first with something which truly engages and which can be rapidly and swiftly marketed by those who try it and love it, perhaps these are the advantages YouTube created?
The asking price is in the region of £850 million - and google are only one in a queue of potential purchasors.
You'd have to expect that yahoo are one of them - even though they are trying a bit of me-too-ism themselves: Click here
We've seen this before, with flickr being bought by yahoo, MySpace by Murdoch. You've got to wonder - did these guys ever have a long term plan to make money - or did they just hope someone would come along with a big bag of cash?
Even if they did, these businesses only have value if you have something else you can offer these audiences - earning revenues from them.
The challenge is doing this in a way that doesn't have them abandoning ship and going looking for the next dude. Ask Ruper Murdoch.