Often when things go wrong, companies take one of two approaches to media queries. The most popular is the `pass the buck` approach. Equally popular, and as annoying, is the `head in the sand` approach.
Take Vodacom`s recent network failures, for example. Sometime near the beginning of the month, Vodacom customers sent a stream of complaints to sites like hellopeter, about Vodacom network downtime.
Despite the multitude of complaints, Vodacom chief communications officer Dot Field stuck the company`s head in the sand and flatly denied there were problems. No failure? I must have been hallucinating when my Vodacom phone said "no network available".
The problem happened again on Friday last week. Being the good journalist I am, I tried to get more comment from Vodacom, to see if the problems were related. After spending the afternoon harassing Vodacom`s office staff and trying to dig the communications head out of the mud, I eventually gave up.
Then, as if by some miracle, I received this e-mail last night at 11.40pm: "From time to time networks experience technical difficulties. It would not be prudent to elaborate on each individual issue, suffice to say that network quality is of paramount importance to our company."
Just tell the truth
Everyone knows technology breaks every now and then, so why not fess up and at least provide customers with some idea of when cellular connectivity will be restored?
Candice Jones, journalist, ITWeb
What happened to honesty is the best policy? I, for one, believe that if Vodacom had said straight out: "Yes something (please name thing here) broke and will take x number of hours or days to fix", it would have made customers feel much more confident in the company`s abilities.
Everyone knows technology breaks every now and then, so why not fess up and at least provide customers with some idea of when cellular connectivity will be restored?
One of the first things I learned as a newbie journalist is that if a company does not create a profile with the media, the media will make a profile for it. Then again, what profile does Vodacom need to build at the end of the day? South Africans have few options when it comes to providers and I`m pretty sure Vodacom is using that to its full advantage.
In the grand scheme of things, most large corporates have the freedom to withhold or dish out as much or as little comment as they like. Problems are not problems if you ignore them for long enough.
Take a look at Telkom. It has managed to survive for years, regardless of the ridiculous number of service and downtime complaints by customers. The company has also been innovative in the "responding to media queries about technical faults" game: it doesn`t respond at all. I suppose since there is no competition to speak of as yet, Telkom can live with whatever profile the media creates for it.
That this approach will come back and bite both companies in the proverbial in the future goes without saying, but for now, they can get away with it. And I suppose the head in the sand or pass the buck approaches make for more interesting reading. I don`t believe there would be half as much scandal around company profiles if they would only own up to any given problem.
The Eskom saga is a good case in point. A problem with no action is a story, but fixing a problem is a back-page remark.
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