Neoco

After four days of service disruptions for Blackberry users last week, makers Research In Motion (RIM) announced that all technical problems were fixed and services resumed to normal. While the technological side of proceedings may well be restored, the blow comes after a summer of bad press for the mobile phone makers.

Despite results from a YouGov survey that reveals Blackberry’s reputation is expected to recover from the signal outage problems and BBM’s inadvertent role in August Riots (as one of the desired methods of communication in organising looting sprees), YouGov’s BrandIndex showed perceptions of Blackberry have nose-dived over the past two months.

Dropping from 10 points on Monday 8 August to -8 by 11 August 2011 and then again falling 11 points on 10 October to -26 on 13 October, down to -52 by Monday, as owners remain frustrated about the way issues were communicated.

Even now, Blackberry have not confirmed the actual fault that caused the four days of problems. This poses clear opportunities for Blackberry to improve their social CRM services.

*What should Blackberry have done during the service outage?*

Crisis management: Blackberry has an extensive reach of social channels; Facebook, YouTube, Twitter (we presume their handle @BlackBerryHelp gained a fair few followers over the four days of outage), however in the first 12 hours of network problems, no updates were made.

Blackberry should have dealt with the outage by acknowledging the problems and letting users know they were working their hardest to resume activity.

*What can Blackberry do now to improve their reputation?*

Blackberry have the benefit of a large social network across multiple channels with the necessary instruments to broadcast their message to many eyes and ears. By making the most of their large numbers of followers and fans, real-time updates as they work through the problems would have kept customers in the loop instead of regurgitating the same message to each individual tweet.

When asked what impact RIM Chief Mike Lazaridis expects the service outage to have on the company’s reputation, Lazaridis replied; “We’re very concerned. It’s a great concern.”

“We’ve worked 12 years since the launch of Blackberry to win the trust of our 70 million subscribers, and we’re going to fully commit to win that trust back. One hundred per cent.”

Message from RIM Founder Mike Lazaridis on the BlackBerry service outage

If times weren’t tough enough already in the increasingly competitive smartphone marketplace;  with iPhone 4S launched last week, the Samsung Galaxy Nexus looming on the horizon and Android slowly closing the gap, Blackberry need to bring something pretty innovative to the table.

Keen for their 8.5 million fans on Facebook to think highly of the brand in the face of compensation requests,  Blackberry have realised the importance of social CRM, by offering users a free Thank You Gift, as a downloadable app from BlackBerry World.

The trick seems to have worked. In the YouGov survey one in two users (49%) disagreed with the statement posed by YouGov that they would not consider buying a Blackberry handset again, only a quarter (24%) said they would think twice before buying another Blackberry.

Will Blackberry’s raft of unhappy customers remain loyal to their ‘Berrys, or stray into the fruit bowl and look to other handsets when their next upgrade is due? Only time will tell.

Tags  Blackberry Brand reputation Loyalty Mike Lazaridis RIM social CRM