O2 working to restore ‘confidence and trust’

O2’s marketing and consumer director Sally Cowdry has apologised for last week’s network outage and says the company is now working to restore “confidence and trust” in the brand, as data shows perception of the brand has plummeted in the last week.

O2

Customers of O2, GiffGaff and Tesco Mobile were left unable to make calls or send texts for a period of about 24 hours last week due to a fault with one of its network systems.

O2’s “Index” score, which is YouGov’s measure of brand perception, has dropped sharply in the week to 16 July. Its score – dropped -12.35 points week on week to 8.79, meaning it is now behind rival Orange in the Index rankings.

The brand’s “buzz”, which is a measure of the positive and negative things said about a company, marked the biggest decline in the period. O2 has dropped from being the second-highest ranked company in the telecoms sector, behind only Skype, to the bottom of all those measured. Its buzz fell -37.61 points to a score of -27.63 in the week-long period.

O2’s impression, value, reputation, satisfaction and recommendation scores have also marked statistically significant declines in the past week.

O2 sought to quell customer concern and answer questions about the outage on its social media. Its reaction to the crisis, which resulted in some irreverent response from O2 to some of its more insulting tweets, was praised by some Twitter users.

Sally Cowdry says: “We apologise to our customers for the network system fault we suffered last week. We are working on how we make it up to those customers who experienced a disruption in service and will be giving more details in the coming days. Right now our priority is to restore confidence and trust and we have launched a full investigation to ensure this does not happen again.”

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