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.

Hello BT! The cost of decent CRM versus the CPA of customers

As requested by @BTCare via twitter... I've used their email contact form to expand on the complaint I've made via phone and tweets.

I had to resort to my PC to do this because the link supplied by BTCare for me to detail all of this didn't open properly on an iPad or iPhone. Think about that for a moment BT. If it had, I wouldn't have written the following on a PC - so almost certainly wouldn't have bothered blogging it. Oh dear. Lesson learned?

Anyway - quick bit of background. I upgraded my broadband to 30+ meg last year and, as part of the deal, got a BT Vision Box. My Freeview recorder had just packed up so I thought, why not? Even though it didn't deliver Freeview HD (which the receiver on my TV does, it's an internet TV with IPlayer and all that good stuff). BT Vision was included in the deal. Services (usually £5 a month) free for year one.

I was told HD was coming soon. Fair enough... I'd sit it out. Then I got a letter offering me a load of new channels... and HD - for an extra £2. I liked the look of the extra channels so rang and tried to get the deal.

Not available for me (so why send it to me?) - I'd have to take out a new contract and pay £7 a month more than I currently do.

Eh?

So... Here's what I sent them. (I like to blog these things for the record since I absolutely hate email 'forms' which have an alarming tendency to crash and leave the consumer with no record of the email being sent) 

I'm annoyed.
I received a letter offering to upgrade my BT Vision service (which is part of a broadband deal I changed to in the latter part of last year).
The letter offered new channels + upgrading terrestrial channels to HD (which I can get free through my TV's freeview receiver anyway).
I was told when taking out the contract HD would be following soon (I could therefore bear losing it via your box in the meantime). As you will be aware, running additional receivers through the same tv is complex so it's an either or decision.
Now it appears that my 'free' year one provision of BT Vision must terminate if I want HD and a new contract at £7 a month begun.
Issues 1: Either my first year was free or it wasn't.
Issue 2: Either the upgrade is £2 or it isn't.
Issue 3. I don't believe your CRM is so poor that you can't differentiate between your offerings to customers.
I called BT Vision and have now initiated a complaint.
This is your error, you shouldn't contact consumers on a one year free intro deal with an offer of a £2 upgrade if it actually isn't available.
You also shouldn't be charging for HD for terrestrial channels with a straight face - since that is available via freeview and similar set set boxes at no charge.
My expectations: Now you've got yourselves into this mess you should honour the offer you have made - I find the package (including HD) reasonable at £2 a month and will pay that.
And you should do so not just for me, you should do so for everyone you have made the offer to who is in a similar position. Your error - you fix it.
Failing this I will happily go back to freeview, acquire my broadband at exactly the same speed through rival suppliers and consider terminating my lengthy and costly and almost never used landline service. 

I hope you will regard my long and valuable custom (MUST BE 25 YEAR PLUS BTW) somewhat higher than the continued (no change to your budgets) £5 a month discount you include in our current contract. 

What exactly is your cost per acquisition of a customer? 

I look forward to hearing your response within 48 hours.
My enquiry reference number: 130323-006027

Seeking interview subjects for our next book

Do you know of a business or organisation benefiting from the application of one or more of the 10 Principles of Open Business?
I'm looking for interview subjects to include in the book Jamie Burke and I are co-authoring on those principles (we have a delivery date of July 31 with publication early 2014).
To take part, please download, complete and return the questionnaire you'll find here ( or embedded below). Given our deadlines we're looking for responses as soon as you are able. A huge thank you to every one of you giving up your time to help in this - together we can change businesses and organisations for the better.

The questionnaire includes both a synopsis of the book and more definitions of the Principles.

As a reminder The 10 Principles are:

1. Purpose:

2. Open Capital

3. Networked Organisation

4. Sharability

5. Connectedness

6. Open Innovation

7. Open Data

8. Transparency

9. Member-Led

10. Trust

Interview Questionnaire for the 10 Principles of Open Business by

Tesco must trust us if they want us to trust them

Tesco is right to start the communications rolling in the aftermath of Britain's horsemeat-in-beef-products scandal. Emails to every customer (that they have emails for - which is a lot, thanks to Clubcard) about the value of trust, promises made about rigorous testing (the stuff we had trusted they were doing anyway) and a commitment to a new website to share progress and outcomes is all great.

But the more exciting, and both business changing and business winning, idea contained in Tesco's new commitments is in the pledge to 'open up our supply chain'.

This not only brings them the benefits of applying some of the 10 Principles of Open Business, it also goes some way to enabling customers to get closer to the wizard, rather than the curtain - in other words, the source of the brand.

And IF they are wise and consistent in the application of Open Business, if they truly wish to become customer-led, then co-creating the fix to this problem with those for whom it is intended will become second nature.

That's the part I see missing from the Tesco plan right now. It feels like the customer is being treated as a receiver of outcome rather than a key stakeholder in the decision making process. CEO Phillip Clarke has told us what he is doing for us, but he hasn't asked us what we think the solutions are, what we think will rebuild trust.

Getting closer to the source is a critical part of that. Being part of steering how that is done is another.

Tesco must first learn to trust us if it wants us to trust it.

Customers want to get closer to the wizard, not the curtain

Image via www.joelafferty.com

The kerfufle over horse meat being passed off as beef in a variety of processed foods in the UK will prove yet another driver towards market authenticity for consumers whose trust in the centre (media, politics, show biz heroes) is being eroded on a daily basis.
While brands try every trick to get closer to their customers (who doesn't want to be 'customer-centric'?), customers are demanding a closer relationship with the wizard behind the curtain of the brand.
They want to get ever closer to the source and are finding ways around the middle men to have their own more direct relationship with that source. I recently suggested the decline of the High Street could be traced to this, at least in part.

A brand is an illusion created by the source, the interpretation of the receiver and the interaction between the two and other receivers.

So what happens when you take the authenticity of the source away? It looks like Findus is about to find out. Because it has revealed it uses third party suppliers in a buck-passing exercise which I doubt will find favour with the British public. They've pulled back the curtain and revealed... nothing is there. The source is long gone.

Some brands exist as arbiters of quality - curators. M&S is a good example. Distributed source - in which the curtain is everything.
But most brand illusions are at risk of disappearing as consumers become more and more savvy about pulling back the curtain and more and more demanding about having a direct relationship with what is behind.

Which takes us back to horse meat. Worries about what enters your food chain should have been quoshed by brands we can rely on (alongside governance regimes we expect to protect us). Both have failed us.
Fixing this requires radical action. As radical as the action that saw the beginnings of the co-operative movement in the dark days of the industrial revolution.

The co-op was founded, fundamentally, to give the working people of Britain a source of food they could rely upon to be unadulterated. In these times flour was often cut with chalk, for example - beer watered down., and much worse that would make horse meat in your lasagne look heaven sent. Yes there were political motivations - but food safety was paramount.

You could trust your co-operative for this as much because the customers were often the same people who grew the food, who processed the food and sold the food. At the very least they would have known people involved. They were local.

Today the co-op owns more farm land in the UK than anyone else. One simple (but big) way to reconnect and to rebuild that trust would be to place its 'out of town' stores on those farms and build farming and processing experiences around them.

It would be one clear example of a brand lifting the curtain, allowing its customers to get closer to its source.

Our trust in one another needs to be rebuilt. And that starts at the source.