iBurst, an internet service provider fails to make use of the internet!
I think iBurst is taking a typical ‘government mentality’ approach towards building their brand, a mentality where the public or rather customers in their case are attempted to be pleased with numbers instead of quality.
As an iBurst customer, there are only two types of emails I get from them; invoices and newsletters telling me how much they’re growing, stating the number of new areas that they now cover. The number of new base stations adds no real value to most existing clients, a better customer service would be a great start!
There are a lot of iBurst clients who are unhappy with their service and more importantly their support system. On average an unhappy client will contact their service provider for support first and if their complaint is not solved or attended to that’s when a client’s frustration gives birth to ‘bad mouthing’, an action that could paralyze a brand.
Social media created opportunities that enable companies to know their customers’ needs, expectations and frustrations better.
iBurst seems to have ignored this phenomenon!
Let’s take Twitter for example; my guess is that the number of iBurst subscribers who uses twitter aren’t more than those who don’t. But I believe those on twitter might consume more bandwidth as there’s usually a lot of ‘links sharing’ that accompanies most twitters’ status updates. Which would make them one of iBurst’s top consumers (pun intended).
Now let me do some work for iBurst! I searched ‘iburst’ on twitter status updates and this is the type of consumer remarks you’ll find:
A friend made the following status update through twitter, which automatically updated his Facebook status via TwitterSync (bad mouthing reaches more audience):
Word of mouth is two-fold; a consumer can either refer their friends to a brand or warn them to stay far away from a brand as possible. Which of the two sides a brand falls under depended purely on the customer’s level of satisfaction with a brand’s product or service!
Consumers tend to trust their friends’ referral to a brand more than company’s brand promise:
iBurst is losing a lot of existing and potential customers to their competition:
What iBurst doesn’t realize is that while their marketing efforts might them bring more clients, their lack of support is chasing existing clients away. And apart from the cost of acquiring new clients being more expensive than keeping existing ones, their brand’s image is suffering from what will be hard and maybe impossible to erase from consumers’ minds, a place where a brand resides!
Unfortunately for iBurst, its competitors are ‘social media’ literate. Below is a good example of a competitor utilizing social media:
The opportunity:
The reaction:
The capture:
And the result:
Not only did iBurst lose a customer in the above case, their competitor also got free publicity plus referrals.
How does an internet provider fail to utilize the internet?
I have never heard of a chef die of starvation!
Err, err, Iburst is f@#%d up period.
They cannot guarantee the availability of service or the speed they claim to provide, albeit theoretically.
And their lack of support for Mac is ridiculous (it keeps disconnecting over and over and over again, especially during peak-business-hours), the terms of agreement is that I will pay a set fee, and connect — if they cannot provide proper drivers for mac, they should say their service is not ‘guaranteed’ for mac.
Anyhow — my beef with them is over, I canceled my contract — I am now running on voda.3g — I will connect through iburst (to deplete the data allocated) at night (when there is less people online, and thus the service is faster).
I am working on getting another type of service — will let you know 1nce I’ve got it, how it goes, if it’s dope (from a peer review I’m told it’s the best thing for anybody who stays connected all the time).
Lebogang Nkoane,
I could well be on my way out too, it’s not a pleasure using iburst especially on a Mac.
The slow connections during peak hours and the frequent connection termination are frustrating!
The worst part of iBurst is their accounts department. Check my blog for a long, angry rant about a 3-year long saga.
I’ve been on ADSL/Cybersmart for the past 3 years – not one problem. I can’t believe iBurst is still in business.
[...] iBurst started tweeting on 7 April this year. Here’s a blogpost from January looking at iBurst’s tardiness in this regard compared to others, the impact of [...]
In terms of your interest in business use and understanding of Twitter, you might be interested to know that iburst has blocked me from following. It puzzles me. How can blocking me help them? I can still read their tweets as it’s public.
The point in any case, surely, should be that they follow me to see what bad things I am saying about them.
http://twitter.com/Grondwerk
RK,
That’s a childish move from iburst! I agree with you that they should be following you to keep track of what you are saying about them — both, the good and bad.
iBurst would definitely have had the opportunity to fix whatever consumers are complaining about before the bad mouthing spreads too far.
The sad part is, I’m assuming, management has no clue of the bad mouthing that’s currently spreading online.
Childish… that’s the word I was looking for.
You should see the mild firestorm on MyBroadBand, with lots of people coming out in support of iBurst… weird. But a lot of people also obviously now tired with me – they don’t have to read my posts though.
You mention ‘bad mouthing spreading online’. Do you have some links. I’d appreciate it, as I want to gather as much information as possible, thanks. I’d appreciate it if you could just email them to me; or just tell me where to look. Google is obviously my friend too.
RK,
I can’t think of any links — but you’re like to get more complaints on twitter and facebook, as that’s where most people voice themselves online.
You can easily do a search on twitter (which I think you might have done) — pity Facebook’s status updates aren’t searchable.
Of course, I have forgotten about facebook. I deleted my FB account many months ago.
Thanks.