How do you behave when you know no one is watching?

July 27, 2012 Written by Francesca Rivett-Carnac

By Rebecca McLeod

And does it matter? That’s just one of the questions we’ve been thinking about at Stand Towers this week.

It all started with 21 bottles of bubbly which went missing before our party (yes we know, serious stuff!). The usually excellent Ocado customer service team seemed pretty un-phased when we phoned to complain… after all what could they do to remedy the situation? Nothing it would seem!

But as soon as we tweeted about our distress, we were showered with money-off vouchers and the experience became very different.

So is it just about making your complaint more public?  Is using Twitter to complain the 2012 equivalent of phoning Anne Robinson’s Watchdog?

Or is it more about who is responding to your complaint and the power they wield?

Well first of all, it’s a problem if companies are treating customers differently based on which method they chose to lodge their complaints.   Yes social media brings customers and brands much closer together, which is a great thing.  But companies need to look at how they can replicate this closeness via other channels.

It seems to us at Stand Agency that it all comes back to a good old-fashioned ‘joined-up approach’.  We all know PR works best when it’s properly integrated into a business and works with all the other business functions: where the organisation lives up to the comms and the comms lives up to the organisation.

But until this joined-up model is used everywhere, maybe the best judge of a company (or a person for that matter) is still how they behave when they know no one is watching!