UTV finds a simple path to good PR

One of the greatest challenges for a company, especially one that deals directly with the general public, is the tricky bit about establishing and maintaining a good corporate image.

Companies spend millions hiring media consultants, public relations firms and advertising agencies to convey just the right image. Imagine how much more difficult the PR job is when people begin with the premise that they automatically dislike you. Imagine, for example, that you are a telecommunications company.

Even though telecoms companies provide a service we all feel warm and fuzzy about - the ability to communicate with friends and relations and significant others through the (relatively) easy format of a phone or internet connection - people generally find their telecoms companies really, really annoying.

Perhaps this is due to poor service; perhaps it's just the general exasperation we have with those permanent fixtures in our life to which we must make regular payments (think electricity, gas and credit card companies, the revenue service, landlords, and those pesky neighbourhood children who seem to need a sponsorship euro from you every week for school fundraisers).

With telecommunications companies, the issue is very often the service provided, especially from the former state-owned incumbent operator, but also from the challengers to the throne. Almost everyone seems to have a story of waiting an eternity for connection services, or for an engineer to come fix a non-functional line, or for someone to come back to you when they promise to.

Or it might be an overabundance of service - as when I looked to get a high-speed, digital subscriber line (DSL) connection installed, and at least four people rang me over a two-week period to "get my account set up". The very first person did this quickly and politely and all the additional calls - which point to the complete lack of any kind of basic computerised customer-handling system - were increasingly infuriating.

The issue of DSL itself makes some people go apoplectic, either because of the lack of availability of the service in their area, or the length of time it will take to get the line put in, or the cost (this is not a topic for polite conversation in some gatherings).

In general, telecommunications companies - though they do good things such as sponsor worthy causes and football teams and arts events, and have many perfectly nice people working for them - just do not get PR. Or to be more precise, they don't understand just how closely intertwined their public image is with the quality of their customer service, as opposed to their charitable acts.

What customers tend to get is evasive answers, or unfulfilled promises, or that kind of formalised corporatespeak that utterly disguises what a company is really saying (yes, I acknowledge that most of this jabber emerged from the American business world where someone long ago decided pompous waffle sounded intelligent or could at least be usefully baffling when the company really had no excuse or nothing further to say. Now that kind of babble fills nearly every corporate press release).

So, when some company does something really different, especially when it shows it understands that good customer service is something as simple as listening to, and answering, your public - boy, does it stand out a mile. And that's exactly what happened last week with Ulster Television.

At the start of the week, UTV announced that it would offer a flat-rate, off-peak internet access package. And rather than just stand back and wait to see what people would think, the company actually got into the trenches with Net users to talk to them. And, based on the feedback it got from potential customers, it reshaped its offering.

This happened when Martin Lyons, the chief technology officer for UTV, went online onto the discussion "boards" - run in this case by Boards.ie, a discussion thread moderated by affordable internet access campaigners Ireland Offline. You can find the discussion by going to http://makeashorterlink.com/?R1F6616D1.

The people who use the boards tend to be Net-savvy, technologically well-informed, and do not beat about the bush. They want direct answers, they detect waffle and avoidance tactics a mile off. They really, really want an always-on internet option of some source, at a reasonable price.

Once word got out about the UTV announcement, they wanted more detail. They began by asking other board members for information. And pretty quickly, Martin was online answering questions. Indeed, he was online before they were asking them, and not because someone told him he should get online in response to an ongoing discussion. That in itself is impressive.

The resulting discussion is now 26 pages long (at last count). In the course of the discussion, UTV both altered the way in which it described its internet product after some niggling about terminology, and then it actually altered the product itself - on the fly, as the discussion continued - in response to board members' requests. The startled and pleased response of the people joining in on the boards said it all. They were utterly amazed someone from a telecoms company would come talk to them, in their forum, in plain language.

Sure, some questions that were asked are still unanswered, not everyone is happy with all elements of the promised UTV service, and it remains to be seen if the company can provide a reliable and attractive service under the charges and terms of agreement it has set out. But the company earned serious credibility points by doing something as simple as going out, finding and talking directly to its prospective market.

Now Esat/BT, NTL and Eircom are all talking of introducing a similar flat-rate service. No doubt we'll see some expensive media campaigns if and when those services are introduced. But they'll have a hard time changing the loyalty of people already won over to UTV, and the good word of mouth generated by a single executive's few well-spent hours online.

klillington@irish-times.ie. weblog: http://radio.weblogs.com/0103966/