Idea Cellular ranks among the Top 10 network operators in India with a network traffic of over 1.5 billion minutes a day.
According to Dec 2011 data, Idea leads all other telecom operators in India in the MNP (Mobile Number Portability) race, with a net gain of 1,031,380 subscribers; i.e. every 4th mobile user who exercises choice through MNP, prefers Idea.
Apart from network service Idea hosts Idea Rocks, initiated in 2005 which is a music competition to find the best musical talent.
Idea Cellular’s presence on Facebook, Twitter and YouTube gives close competition to Vodafone and Airtel. The brand is officially present on Facebook, Twitter and YouTube.
They are presently running a parallel campaign on Facebook and Twitter on the hashtags #IdeaFrames and #IdeaMovieStar but we hardly found any engagement from fans on Facebook; however on Twitter we did notice a couple of entries.
Let’s have a look at the various elements of their social customer service approach one by one to find out how active the telecom provider is on social media;
Element 1 – Tone of Messaging
Idea Cellular has a formal tone of communication on Facebook and Twitter. However, they do not follow industry standards like having the agent’s name following the communication.
Element 2 – Are they sending canned responses, without understanding the context?
On Facebook, Idea Cellular’s page seems to be a billboard of complaints. On most of the posts we found only complaints and grievances; and almost zero relevant engagement from fans posts. While analyzing their page we were actually wondering if the page is run by a human or a bot, because the only response made by the admin was:
On Twitter, we found better engagement, and it’s apparent that a human responds, see the below example:
Element 3 – Response Time
Idea has a response time of 50 mins on Facebook (analyzed from June 2014 data) whereas on Twitter it is an astounding 27.8 hours (The data has been taken from replies/conversations from past three days).
This shows that Idea has a relatively poor social CRM system. We found several complaints especially on their Facebook page which are unattended. Few examples:
Element 4 – Is brand sending personalized replies?
No personalization of repsonses; on Facebook they send a general message that begins with ‘Dear customer’, while on Twitter they just reply with the handle of the fan.
Element 5 – Is brand following up on the complaints?
Forget about follow ups, they are not even doing what they are saying, few classic examples below:
Element 6 – Is brand answering to all the queries?
Though they are answering to queries, but many are still unanswered.
Element 7 – Is the brand present on major complaint forums?
Mouthshut.com which is one of the biggest online complaint forums in India has about 433 complaints about Idea’s services but none of the complaints/queries have been responded, which is not at all expected from a reputed brand!
The same is true on www.consumercomplaints.in, where we found more than 1000 complaints on Idea.
Element 8 – Is brand sending duplicate replies?
Thankfully, on Twitter, they send customized responses however on Facebook, the only message they send is:
Idea is doing comparatively better than most telecom brands but they have to go a long way to compete with Vodafone and Airtel. Although Idea Cellular is pretty active on their social channels, they definitely need to improve on their social CRM. We hardly found any positive feedback from their fans in our analysis. They need to learn from what their competitors are doing and send personalized responses so that the fans know the brand is genuinely talking to them. According to our April’s telecom report, Idea was at No 6 with a SSI score of only 58.4.
Share your experience below if you have ever tried Idea Cellular’s network.