Can you hear me now?

In case there was any question about it at all, the recent and ongoing travails of Vodafone underline the fact that when it comes to brand, operations don’t just matter, they are the whole ball game. 

Following on from customer fury over service levels comes the recent revelations about sensitive customer information left virtually unprotected and accessible to all.

It’s easy to look at the situation and ask how could they be so stupid, but a bit like any major company crisis where operational integrity is shown to be lacking, once the fault lines are exposed there is usually major damage at hand (BP anyone).

The promises they have failed to keep are myriad, with the latest privacy failure being just one. Their privacy promise – from the Vodafone website:

“When you visit the site or communicate with us, we’ll use the information you provide in the ways you’d reasonably expect us to – for example, service delivery or improvement or customer support. Where you have choices about how we use the information you provide, we’ll tell you so at the point of collection…”

I am guessing that there was no notice “at point of collection” that they provide information and other private details such as call history, and billing would be made easily available to anyone who could execute a basic search.

Their “power to you” promise has also been shown as a sham as evidenced by the class action brought against them by 9,000 customers for failing to deliver even basic levels of service and connectivity, while continuing to charge for those services as if nothing was wrong.

And in the last 48 hours Vodafone donated $100,000 to the Queensland Flood appeal and waived the bills of those affected. While an admirable gesture on their part, the response via social media has shown customers to be less than impressed. Tweets such as “Vodafone donated $100,000… what about some reception, etc for your customers?” and “perhaps #vodafone could invest another 100K into a personal server to hold their database?” summed up the bulk of the sentiment.

These are not unrelated incidents. A good deed gets buried by cynicism about the actions of the brand, which is in turn a reaction to ongoing service failures and lack of response, further compounded by the privacy breach.

And the brand lesson of Vodafone lies in that relationship.

A business is a highly interdependent system – one part is connected to every other part and issues or problems WILL cross over and disrupt even seemingly unrelated areas and eventually bleed out into the marketplace to undermine even well intentioned actions.

UPDATE: In news just as I had finished writing this blog this morning, Vodafone confirms that the portal where customer information is stored has been breached by an employee or dealer who shared the password (one hopes there was more than one password).

Vodafone is looking into the breach. A suggestion – the breach is a symptom of a flawed security policy and perhaps that is where they should be expending their time, after securing the existing system of course.

See you next week.

Michel Hogan is a Brand Advocate. Through her work with Brandology here in Australia and in the United States, she helps organisations recognise who they are and align that with what they do and say, to build more authentic and sustainable brands. She also publishes the Brand thought leadership blog – Brand Alignment.