Many of our contributors have written about the importance of engagement. Engaging customers across various platforms improves a business’ image in their eyes, which leads to more loyal customers. Ultimately, brand loyalty leads to better sales as those loyal customers keep coming back.

The contributors and I have been giving you hints, tips and advice on how you can engage with your customers, often advising that it should be done as much as possible. But engagement isn’t always the best course of action. In fact it can be the worst, as we found out yesterday (Thursday).

Yesterday morning, British Gas announced a price increase that will affect eight million customers, with a rise of 9.2% for its dual-fuel customers. Considering the already tight budgets in what we all know are tough economic times, customers were outraged at the price hike.

Disaster

In a bid to improve the situation and allay people’s fears, British Gas took to Twitter to hold a Q&A with Customer Services Director Bert Pijls, using #AskBG. It was hoped that the Q&A would show British Gas a company who cares about its customers and doesn’t ignore them. This quest for engagement turned out to be a disaster.

Here are a few tweets sent to British Gas:

“@garwboy: #AskBG My office has a window where the sun comes in and makes the side of my head really hot. How much do I owe you?”

“@LeeJamesVincent: Hi Bert, which items of furniture do you, in your humble opinion, think people should burn first this winter? #AskBG”

“@mearlwilliams: Why the chicken cross the road? Cos no-one could afford to cook it anymore. #AskBG”

“@robbalaar: #AskBG @BritishGas I've been a loyal customer for a few years. How will you feel when pensioners die from choosing to eat instead of heat???”

What did British Gas do wrong?

Whilst the idea of trying to engage with and ‘be there’ for the customers is a good one, the timing of British Gas’ Q&A was its downfall. It was held between 1 and 2pm yesterday afternoon. That is just hours after the price hike was announced.

For the Q&A to be successful, British Gas would have needed the customers to be calm in order to have a frank conversation. However, given the nature of the situation, it is almost entirely unrealistic to expect worried and quite frankly, irate customers who have had more than £100 added to their energy bills to calm down within a few hours.

Instead of allowing its customers to calm down, British Gas jumped the gun, expecting that any engagement with its customers at this point would be good engagement, good PR and good for the company.

A Twitter Q&A could have been a good idea for British Gas, but not a few hours after adding over £100 to customers’ bills. Instead they should have let the dust settle for a few days, or a week. Of course, even a week later you wouldn’t expect a glowing response from customers. But it would be more reasonable to expect frustrated questions rather than angry and irate ones.

Social media is a fantastic tool for engagement. But like most things, it can be disastrous if not done right. That’s probably why British Gas moved quickly to post a job advert for a Social Media Senior Manager. Anyone think they could do better?

 

By Jonathan Davies, Editor of the Digital Marketing Magazine. 

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