September 06, 2013

Childish VM support tweet

Sometimes Virgin's off-the-wall communications to frustrated customers can come across as too flippant, especially to new customers who are experiencing problems. A friend at work sent me this tweet they got when they experienced multiple problems with both broadband and TV services having only recently joined VM from TalkTalk. They were not impressed, and are now seriously considering leaving VM.
I'm all for a less formal communications but this perhaps oversteps the mark and comes across as childish. As the kids would say, #notimpressed

4 comments:

DatingKit.io said...

On the one hand I think the tweet was lost in translation, I think they were "Boo Hiss Boo" about their service being a bit of a let down. It came across as a supportive tweet to me in the way that if a child was to say "I am scared of monsters" a parent would say "Boo and Hiss to those nasty monsters!"
So in that regard I believe that maybe the way the message was worded was misunderstood,

BUT.... I do think that companies can be off the wall about marketing but they have to be professional and helpful and courteous at all times when it comes to support and I do think that even taken the wrong way, the tweet was too casual. It should have read "We are sorry to hear you are having problems, can I suggest...." as you are meant to give the BEST customer service and not just act like a stranger having a drink at the same bar as you! So I do think VM have to improve their customer interaction and leave the fun, quirky and off-the-wall humour to the marketing men who advertise their products. It only takes one misunderstanding over a bit of humour and you can lose hundreds of customers who feel they are being taken advantage off.

So to sum up, I think the humour was taken the wrong way by the customer who maybe misunderstood the way it was meant to come across, but the end result is that customer service should always be professional and excellent towards a customer in a way that there is very little chance of misunderstandings such as this ever occurring!

John McE said...

If I ever received such a sarcastic response, I'd cancel my services immediately.

I think the person that sent this should be reprimanded or fired.

To be fair though, any responses I've ever had from Virgin have been friendly and helpful.

Unknown said...

Apparently Virgin Media Twitter has been hacked continuously ever since they struck a deal with BT. Thats what the ladie at the call center told me yesterday.

I wonder who is orchestrating these problems? or maybe its a bunch of random idiots(Sky).

Unknown said...

The way customer service has gone recently on VM I am not surprised they would do this. I have been getting very bad customer service recently.