Vodafone, are you listening?

Hi Vodafone.

Thanks for all the mail you continue to send to the previous owner of our house. Unfortunately I seem to be having as much trouble reaching you as you're having reaching them.

It started out ok. I would write a polite request on the Vodafone envelope asking for the letter to be returned to sender. Then I'd take a short detour while walking the dog to place it in the mail box.

A few months went by and my requests to return to sender became less polite. CAPITAL LETTERS and some exclamation marks started to appear, e.g. PLEASE REMOVE THIS ADDRESS FROM YOUR DATABASE!! Some months I would comment on my sadness and frustration that, (far more importantly than wasting their own money) they were wasting precious forests as they continued to use non-recycled paper on envelopes to people who they knew no longer lived at that address.

It has now been two years and I can no longer count how many polite, frustrated and recently downright rude return to sender requests I have written on those envelopes, or how many times the dog and I have taken the detour to the mail box.

Today I finally resorted to other methods of trying to get through to them. I spent five minutes writing a nice, neutrally worded piece of feedback on their site, only to find I had to enter my email address at the end to send it. Based on my experiences thus far, I'm not interested in giving them another address! So I tweeted about my problem. Vodafone has several Twitter ID's so hopefully they, (or someone at one of their agencies) also actually listens to/monitors Tweets containing their company name. Perhaps they also monitor mentions of 'Vodafone' on blogs?

Lets see what happens. I'll keep you posted (pardon the pun).

Comments

[Lee_Vodafone]

Hi Rob,

I work for Vodafone's Web Relations Team and have just read about the problems you've been experiencing here and am keen to get this finally resolved for you.

To help me to do this could email your full post code together with the name of the previous occupant to [email protected] and I'll get on the case for you.

Thanks and look forward to hearing from you again soon.

Lee
Vodafone UK

[Lee_Vodafone]

Hi Rowan,

Apologies for getting your name wrong earlier today.

Just thought I pop back on to say that we haven't received anything from as of yet. Could you let me know as soon as you've emailed us so that we get on the case as quickly as possible?

Thanks,

Lee
Vodafone UK

[Ro]

Hi Lee,

That was quick! I am in Sydney, Australia. I've been returning the mail to PO Box 153, Artarmon NSW 1570, Australia.

So, not sure whether you handle this from the UK? (Sorry, I should have mentioned location before). But would appreciate any help you can provide!

I'll email you now.

Many thanks,

Rowan

[Ro]

Interestingly, I have heard nothing more.

Location is often an issue for 'listening' strategies. The challenge is that many bloggers use blogging tools and servers outside of their country. In other words, the internet does not share the physical world's geographic borders. This poses a problem for companies wanting to listen 'locally'. To give you an example, the Australia IBM team is trying to listen to mentions of 'Smarter Planet' (the IBM advertising campaign) online, WITHIN Australia. Bloggers in Australia using Typepad / Blogger / Wordpress (or any server outside of Aus) will find their posts / blog will not show up when a relevant keyword is searched for, when 'pages from Australia' is selected.

It would make sense for many companies to have a global listening strategy, with a global 'listening team' passing feedback on to the country it is relevant to.

Fingers crossed Vodafone Australia find my post sometime soon...

[Jennie Bewes (Twitter @jbewes)]

Hey Rowan,

You can uncross your fingers now - I've found your post (thanks to Lee at Vodafone UK) :)

Two years? Argh!! So sorry, about that!! There's clearly a hole in the process, so thanks for raising it.

I've forwarded the issue on to our customer experience team but will personally follow it through for you to make sure it gets resolved -- I'll get back to you as soon as I hear from them.

On a separate note, I read your post around Global monitoring - I tend to agree, though do feel it equally as important to monitor and track at the local level too... I might've picked this up a bit earlier had we had better tools to do this ;)

Speak soon (and feel free to email me if you have anything else to add :)),

Jen

Jennie Bewes
Head of Online
Vodafone Australia

[Ro]

Jen,

Many thanks! I look forward to not receiving the mail anymore :-)

By the way, if you come across any tools that allow you to listen locally (e.g. find mentions of a keyword within Australia, even if the blogger is using Typepad / Blogger etc), please let me know!

I'll add you on Twitter (I'm @rohetherington).

Many thanks again.