wTesco have their fair share of followers online, particularly on Twitter – their ‘Tesco Mobile’ account currently has over 73 thousand followers alone. The supermarket giant have a great deal of customers tweeting to them with queries, ranging from requests for assistance with certain products, store locations or some further product reviews. However, not all of these are positive…
Not all Twitter users go to their favourite or least favourite business online for help. Some customers go onto Twitter to hurl abuse and dissatisfaction at businesses and Tesco sure have had this done to them before. However, Tesco have taken a rather different approach to responding….
Firstly, we have the case of a Tesco responding to the tweet “tweeting us a 11 o’clock is that not past your bedtime?” To which the customer replied, “Yeah it is! I’m still waiting for the web page to load!”#tescoconnection.”
Tesco have posted many tweets like this. Another example involved somebody tweeting them about a Tesco Mobile Voicemail. Tesco quickly replied and insinuated that the customer’s mates were ignoring them. Ouch!
Tesco seemed to gain a great deal of popularity with the pictures featured, both of them ended up on the Lad Bible and received a great deal of retweets and favourites. So spot on for getting their Twitter followers and hashtag fanatics onside.
One thing we would question though, is who in Tesco thought this was absolutely necessary? Did Tesco’s former CEO, Philip Clarke, make this decision for Tesco’s online presence to be hilariously funny and try to increase followers and awareness in the company through using sarcastic responses? Or was it the online marketing manager’s fault for this? Whoever’s decision it was, Tesco certainly did this to gain publicity. After all; what greater way to increase awareness, than mocking people.
Tesco pride themselves for their customer service so is passing remarks like this to really helping their image? Or is it making them stand out from other supermarkets for not caring about customer relations or not even caring for their customers? Of course, not everybody that tweets to Tesco is a customer, but nonetheless, they could be a customer and by patronising them surely it would damage the possibility of them ever using Tesco?
By Content Contributor, Matthew Clifton
Photo Source: [CC by 3.0], via Wikimedia Commons with in-house title overlay.
