Business in dialogue

“The terror of T-mobile is funny. With every mistake they tell you sorry and refer you to the customer service. Waiting time 4 hours…”

It was this message that Dutch comedian Youp van ‘t Hek placed on his twitter after trying to solve his sons problems with an iPhone. Immediately, people recognized this problem started to respond with almost 4000 reactions. Within half an hour he received a phonecall from T-mobile that all problems would be solved immediately. When his son goes to the shop and again doesn’t get proper help he expresses his anger through twitter and is again called that everything will be solved. van ‘t Hek is fed up and declares war on the helpdeskterror. By this time, the estimated damage for telephone provider T-mobile is already between 200.000 and 300.000 euro. After writing a column about this in a national newspaper, he received thousands reactions of people that encounter similar problems with T-mobile or other big companies such as Ziggo, UPC and Vodafone. Van ‘t Hek invited everybody to mail him their experiences so that he can bundle it in a funny book.

This example shows the power of people finding others with similar issues via online social networks. All the individual complaints where now heard as this affair was discussed in many talk shows and online blogs. T-mobile apologized to van ‘t Hek for the mistakes that were made. T-mobile manages WOM by facilitating, moderating and participating in WOM using media like twitter. The lesson that can be learned from this case is that even if you have a pro-active and open WOM strategy the consumer can still meet and group together on other social platforms where you might not be aware about. Obviously, T-mobile also monitors its WOM adequately since van ‘t Hek received his first phonecall from T-mobile within an half hour but it was already too late. They could not get control over the situation anymore and the brand got damaged.

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