Telstra says ‘thanks’ but faces a social media backlash instead
A Telstra promotion offering loyal customers discounted Bon Jovi tickets has sparked a social media backlash against the telco after customer demand crashed the ticketing website Bang Tango.
The Bon Jovi promotion was part of Telstra “Thanks” program, which was launched in February, and has seen the company spend millions of dollars rewarding customers.
The Bon Jovi tickets were meant to be available this morning at 9am Eastern on live music website Bang Tango. However, customer demand crashed the site for most of the morning.
“When we announced our partnership with Bon Jovi customers were asked to register and receive a unique code which would allow them to buy tickets this morning,” said a Telstra spokesman.
I never understand vengeful social media feedback… why can’t people just chill out?
another great example of why corporates shouldn’t bother with social media – its not only thankless, when you try to be nice it backfires on you because the dominant voices on social are complaining and ungrateful with a big sense of entitlement
The tickets on sale through bangTango were not discounted.
BangTango added a premium onto each ticket, making them slightly more expensive than the tickets that will go on sale on Monday.
Suggest Bang Tango chats to the folks at Click Frenzy…
When a business promises something in its advertising and then cannot fulfil the promise customers feel let down. They are disappointed.
It is nothing to do with a “sense of entitlement”.
Marketing 101: Deliver on your promise.
Marketing 102: If you can’t deliver on the promise do not call your customers ungrateful.
Tthe most surprising thing here is that Bon Jovi still have enough fans to crash a website.
Telstra = clueless
I wish they’d offered me a cheaper datapack instead. Why is it, we are not meant to look a gift horse in the mouth? Do I want to look inside Bon Jovi’s mouth?
The laughable thing here was the continual and stupid mistakes made in the execution of this event.
Firstly, using a new and untested company such as BangTango. For a leader in the market they shouldn’t be cutting corners and should be going with a company that is more reputable. The website crashing from the get go begs the question, why was Telstra not hosting the site to begin with?
Secondly, how on Earth can you justify charging $15 per ticket PLUS 2% CC fee to customers as part of a loyalty campaign? That’s close to a $70 fee for purchasing 4 tickets. Lesson? Provide value to your customers.
After the site was fixed in the first instance, people still had issues with unique codes not working (been used before apparently), then tickets not being available, but really they were because the system wasn’t updating itself after purchases weren’t completed.
The lack of communication was also appalling with customers complaining that after 3 hours they still had not heard from Telstra as to what exactly was going on. Isn’t that what social media is all about, to have a direct line of communication to your audience?
And whilst yes, you could gauge how many people would hit the site based on pre registrations, if you put a media spend (which looked significant considering the number of times I saw the ads) where there was no mention of a pre registration, you need to assume that there are going to be additional people hitting the site at 9am on the Monday morning.
I really hope for Telstra’s case they manage to get rid of the poor work experience kid who managed this project, because you would hate to think they are actually paying someone to run a project this poorly.
Worst website ever… you couldn’t even see where your seats were until completion of transaction…NOT good enough Telstra and so not worth the effort
This whole thing is a stuff up. It is obvious that Wayne Swan was in charge of this whole ticketing fiasco.
I tried to buy Bon Jovi tickets and all I got was used tickets to the Sydney Olympics and free call waiting.