Twitter comes to rescue of frustrated cell phone users

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Twitter comes to rescue of frustrated cell phone users

Vodafone has utilized social media as part of its marketing strategy over the last 18 months.

By Desiree Alemao

BANGALORE (Jan. 19)—In a country with the second-largest number of cell phone consumers and where we see rapid growth of the telecom industry, it comes as no surprise that cell phone service providers are now turning to social media to deal with consumer complaints.

Vidhi Kapoor, consular executive for the Republic of Maldives, from Mumbai, said: “I was very frustrated with my cell phone operator services, and no amount of calls to their customer care helped. When I finally tweeted about, they finally took action.”

“From now on if I need anything I just tweet, and they arrange a call back,” Kapoor said.

The two most proactive service providers when it comes to social media are Airtel (@Airtel_Presence) and Vodafone (@VodafoneIN) with about 15,000 and 21,000 followers respectively.

In India Internet penetration has reached 8.5 percent, with 121 million users, and the telecom industry is expected to grow at a white-hot rate of 26 percent this year. This makes it very conducive for the large-scale growth of social media usage.

Mobile service providers have taken this opportunity to be more active on social media to reach a wider audience.

Shruti Amin a client servicing executive said: “I am very active on Twitter and since I had been facing a problem with my cell phone provider I decided to try my luck and tweet to them. To my surprise they replied promptly, and my problem was fixed within a day."

Such platforms are great to look into customer grievances not just for mobile service providers, but also for other companies and firms from the service industry as well.

Rohit Kumar, an executive at Vodafone, said the company is now looking at tying up social media with customer services to enhance the customers’ experience and no longer look at these things as two separate processes. “Social media is the way to go right now as most of our customers use social media to find premium products and offers,” Kumar said. “So there is no better place to reach out to the customers, and it is the kind of forum where they can influence others as well.”