Month: February 2015

Could this promotion cause more harm than good?

It’s common to see brands unintentionally create threats to their own reputations in the process of promotion, and we believe Delta’s latest email campaign is one such example. Have a look:

This example was forwarded by our colleague Phil Cox, who posed the question, “Why is Delta only promising 20 minutes or less until the end of March?”, and we doubt he’s the only one thinking along those lines. While it’s a great guarantee, the fact that it’s only for a small promotional period is just as likely to be salt in old memories of lost or long-delayed bags as it is an enticing promise, surely not what Delta was aiming for.

Meeting legal obligations doesn’t win you any favors in the court of public opinion

Auto recalls have been big news over the past couple years. One of the most serious came as a result of General Motors’ ignition switch issues, which have reportedly caused more 50 deaths over the whopping 11 years the issue went unaddressed. GM’s response, however, isn’t coming anywhere near living up to the degree of the crisis.

Instead of handling claims in a way that demonstrated compassion and personal care, GM outsourced victim’s claims to a dispute-resolution attorney, a move many see as a way to create distance between the brand and the fallout from an insanely callous business practice that cost many their lives. Not only that, but reports state as many as 3,000 of the just-over 4,000 claims submitted have been thrown out by this attorney, some for reasons as outrageous as the fact that the person killed was a passenger in the car and not the owner/driver. Of course in any case like this there are false claims submitted, but public sentiment and statements from the family of victims clearly show the process is causing more problems than it solves as far as GM’s reputation goes.

Even worse, despite begging from U.S. lawmakers, GM closed claim submissions on January 31.

We can’t speak to GM’s intent, but what this looks like to the public is a massive company trying to avoid as much damage as possible. Remember, you can be as technically correct as you want, but the court of public opinion judges on feeling and perception, not merely fact.

A rare corporate apology done right

The Anthem hack, which exposed the personal information of as many as 80 million customers, put the healthcare provider in an ugly situation. Not only were its own computer security team’s credentials stolen and used to access private information, but it was revealed that the data was not encrypted. This left customers more than a little upset, but by showing its understanding of their feelings Anthem in its apologetic email the organization took a big step in the direction of successful crisis management.

We constantly catch companies forgetting one or another of our Three C’s of Credibility – confidence, competence, and compassion – in their apologies, but Anthem nailed all three. While this letter is but a small part of the crisis management required for a breach of this size and sensitivity, it did its job by showing anxious and upset stakeholders that Anthem understands how they feel and is working to make things right again.

[Editor’s note: We welcome another insightful guest post from Issue Outcomes’ Tony Jaques as he shares some perspective on the flood of “outrage” we see on a near-daily basis.]

Much ado about nothing?

Social media has proved a powerful tool for raising legitimate issues onto the public agenda. But it has also facilitated a flood of confected issues and manufactured outrage.

Identifying the difference between the two is now an emerging challenge for issue managers and other senior executives. When can you reasonably ignore a confected issue and when might a real issue slip under the radar and cause reputational damage?

The extent of manufactured outrage was on display recently when JP Morgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon used a mild ‘profanity’ when speaking to analysts. Discussing the bank’s disappointing quarterly results he said the firm needed to be more careful to “stop stepping in dog****.”

Hardly earth-shaking. Far worse can be heard on network television every night of the week. Was it wise? No. Did it detract from the bank’s message on its financial position? Maybe. Did it warrant a blizzard of outrage from over-excited commentators? Absolutely not. The bank quite rightly treated the commentary for what it was and moved on.

Another example was when First Lady Michelle Obama arrived in Saudi Arabia without her hair covered. America’s enemies and critics expressed outrage at a perceived insult to Islam, while the President’s supporters described it as a brave statement about women’s rights. However, objective observers say it was neither, and was entirely in line with well-established protocol followed by a who’s who of high-profile women visitors to the Kingdom, including Laura Bush, Hillary Clinton, Angela Merkel and Condaleeza Rice.

The problem when facing false outrage is that it’s far too easy to feel a need to explain and apologise. We know from risk guru Peter Sandman that risk is a function of hazard (what kills you) and outrage (what makes you upset) and that hazard and outrage are equally real, equally measurable and equally manageable. He warns us that it’s very dangerous to dismiss outrage as “just perception.”

But manufactured outrage is something quite different. In fact Scott Adams (of Dilbert fame) recently coined a new word – outragism – and defined it as the act of generating public outrage by quoting famous people out of context. His purpose, he said, is to arm victims of false accusations with a word that has equal weight to the accusation.

The reality is that corporations and other organisations can equally be victims of ‘outragism’ or other forms of manufactured outrage. This is not an invitation to ignore legitimate issues and concerns. Many companies have paid a very high price for this mistake. Think no further than United Airlines famously mishandling the broken guitar claim of singer Dave Carroll, who responded by posting a song about it on Youtube. It severely damaged the airline’s reputation and, at most recent count, had accumulated more than 14 million views.

Deciding whether something is a substantive concern or merely trivial is a challenging judgement call for companies everywhere. It demands wisdom and judgement … and strong nerves.

Or rather, lack thereof

Comcast, already one of the most hated companies in the world, drew yet more (well-deserved) vitriol early this month after it was revealed that customers were having the names on their accounts changed to things like “a-hole”, “whore”, “dummy”, and “super bitch”, most likely by angry phone reps. The first of these incidents came to light in late January on the blog of consumer report Chris Elliott, and here’s Comcast’s response:

It’s a privilege to have customers use our products and to have them invite us into their homes. Each and every customer deserves to be treated with respect, and in a recent situation with a customer in Spokane that clearly didn’t happen.

We have apologized to our customer for this unacceptable situation and addressed it directly with the employee who will no longer be working on behalf of Comcast. We’re also looking at a number of technical solutions that would prevent it from happening moving forward.

We took this opportunity to reinforce with each employee just how important respect is to our culture. In every interaction we have with a customer, we need to show them respect, patience, and enthusiasm to provide them with an excellent experience.

The culture of a company is the collective habits of its people – we have great people at Comcast and we need to treat customers with the respect they deserve. Respect is not just how we speak with customers, but also respect for their time and making it much easier for them to interact with us … whether it’s solving a problem, ordering service or simply asking a question.

We’re working hard to transform the customer experience and all of our employees play an important role in making that happen. We’ll take every opportunity to learn from our mistakes and fix issues to make their experience better.

Since then several more cases have come to light, making the above statement’s angle of the name-calling being limited to one disgruntled employee, as well as the promise to reinforce with employees how important respect is, seem disingenuous at best. Elliot did manage to get a brief statement from Comcast’s senior VP of customer service, who shared the following:

“We’re retraining our teams on the importance of making name changes properly,” he said. “We’re looking for automated solutions to prevent this from happening in the future.”

Comcast says it will follow up with each customer, offer an apology and “do whatever it takes to make things right,” says Karinshak.

That Comcast’s Vice President of customer service is viewing this as a problem fixable through automation tells you all you need to know. The company culture at the cable giant is clearly sick, and they’re busy treating the symptoms instead of the cause. With major threats like Google Fiber looming, Comcast needs to hop on the crisis management wagon quickly, or it could very well find itself nothing more than a bad memory in its customers’ past down the road.