Latest changes at NC+
Mariusz Pleban, 17.04.2013
Official apology issued by Julien Varley, NC+’s president, is an important step towards company’s redemption. Admitting the fault and inaugurating a series of new policy regulations might help to retain those customers who still have not decided to cancel their contracts. Another conscious attempt made by NC+ was to allow customers to choose if they want to automatically accept new offer or not. Time heals all wounds. Once all the commotion dies down, NC+ will finally be able to impalement all the desired changes: not in a hasty, but in an effective way.
The NC+ case proved that proper communications may be more precious than gold and that pricing policy is a delicate matter in Internet-dominated era. It seems that social media have become efficient market regulation tools, by means of which the public stigmatizes any abnormalities. Last week, the company managed by Julien Verley decided to introduce a series of customer satisfaction-oriented changes. These where carefully monitored by thousands of disgruntled customers on a special Facebook page Anty NC+. The Facebook NC+ antifans, armed with a ‘hogwash detector’, are governed by emotions: each comment which is not in line with the expected change in policy gives rise to general discontent and angry outburst.
NC+ tried to introduce new regulations a bit too hastily. The company became short of arguments in favor of the new offer, failing to abide by one important rule: customers are always sensitive to negative information and undervalue the positive aspects. That is why it‘s the customers’ anxieties and doubts that need to be dealt with in the first place. The TV operator clearly did not predict the reaction of the customers. In his last interview, NC+’s president pointed out that marketing research conducted before the platform’s launch were advantageous from the company’s point of view. Apparently, the researchers forgot that if the changes are too quick, there might not be enough time to examine the customers’ reaction properly. It’s also probable that the interpretation of the research results favored those arguments that supported previously assumed hypotheses.
One should also bear in mind that NC+ company is in a state of transition, and the merger of different organizational cultures of N and C+ platform did not make the whole process easier. The company’s management was forced to deal both with dissatisfied customers and internal anxieties of its own employees. There are two possible scenarios: the external crisis will either contribute to the organization’s integration or highlight the problems and differences in thinking. The latter aspect of the crisis is always less apparent, but its influence on the company’s decisions is equally important. How important? Anyone can tell by analyzing NC.
The text was originally published on press.pl, April 12th, 2013
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Meteorites, meteors, planetoids, comets - all these can be found in Russia along with other space junk. Shooting celestial bodies have recently become a true hallmark of this Slavic country, all thanks to YouTube videos which inundated the Internet last Friday. A sizable proportion of Russian drivers arm their Lada and Mercedes vehicles with dashboard cameras (or dash cams for short), which...
PR Predictions for 2013
Multi Communications, 29.01.2013
At the start of each year, industries of all kinds provide us with year-in-review recaps and make predictions for the upcoming twelve months. With the continuing rise of social media, content creation and citizen journalism, 2013 is bound to be dynamic in the public relations field. We asked our Public Relations Global Network (PRGN) PR partners from around the world for their 2013 predictions....
