Well… I’m sorry I did.  In fact, I am sorry that I have involved myself with this company at all.  So dissatisfied, that I created a list on twitter for “Companies I Hate” and added Stream as the number one entry.  ***Edit: Stream Energy and I have come to a resolution for my particular concern. The resolution has been added later in this blog post.

Stream Energy's website - Jan. 2010 (click to see full-size)

Why?  Simple really – it all comes down to customer service.  But first, let’s look at their website again.  They claim, “With competitive rates and outstanding customer service, Stream Energy has quickly established itself as a leading power and gas utility company serving the needs of customers in Texas and Georgia.”

So they make a pretty bold claim here.  Not only will you get competitive rates, but you will get outstanding customer service.

First, the rates – they are in line with the others in my area.  Maybe a penny less per therm.  I have yet to get my bill, so I don’t know what surcharges are hidden in there and if in fact they will be less expensive.  The teaser rate is significantly less.  I’ll go along with the word “competitive” in this case.

Now, lets talk about customer service.  Or should I say dis-service.

I’m going to skip the whole PITA (pain in the ass) online application (which wastes a good 20 minutes [if you read everything] and  requires a follow up confirmation call) and skip right to the confirmation portion.  I was told I had a morning hook-up scheduled (hours between 8 AM and noon) and that I had to be on premises to pay a $25.00 connect fee.  Since my alternative residence is only 15 minutes away, I asked if they could call me en-route so that I could meet them.  I was told this was not possible.  OK, I can live with that so I made arrangements to not have appointments that morning so that I could sit in a house with no running water and no heat in order to wait for gas hook up.   Please note: The confirmation date was a good week and a half out and the premises in question is already equipped with a gas meter hook up.

Did they arrive on time?  If my watch was set for the Hawaiian Time Zone (UTC -10h), then yes.  A service tech did not arrive until 3:42 PM.  Yep, I waited almost twice as long as the window promised in a cold house, losing billable time.

Now I am hungry and have my afternoon appointments in jeopardy because the hook up has not occurred yet.  I call my clients and reschedule.  I call Stream to find out what the deal with my hook up is.   Did I call Stream Energy?  You bet I did. By the way – if you don’t know your account number, you will need to go through several menu choices to talk to a representative.

Here’s where I get mad.  I am now told that my hook up is an all day appointment.  I ask how long is a day – what are the working hours?  I am told it shows as all day.  Yes, you told me that.  When does the day end?  4 PM? 5PM? 7PM?  Worse, I felt as if I couldn’t ask my question because the CSR kept interrupting me before I finished asking my question.  How can you help me if you don’t listen to my question?  I am given the phone number for Atlanta Gas Light.  Great, another number to call because Stream can’t answer my question.  Inefficient and rude.

I call AGL.  They send a tech over who tells me that I didn’t need to be on premises and I don’t need to pay $25.00 on the spot.  Great – now Stream totally had me waiting there for no reason and I lost a complete day of billable time.   A whole day of billable time to save on 2 months of service.  Yeah – that’s a good deal!

***Resolution communication

So what to do?  Turn to social media.  They have FaceBook and Twitter plastered on their website.  Unfortunately, on FaceBook – its a FAN page.  At this point I am anything but a FAN.  So I tweet.  I decide I am going to Tweet at least once a day until I either receive a response from Stream OR get sick of bashing a company.

It took Stream Energy ONE WEEK to respond to me.  The initial contact did come from a Sr. Executive (name and position withheld without release permission).   I also recognize that every story has 3 sides:  both parties and the truth which lies somewhere in-between.   I’m also sure my view is still obscured by what I perceived to be lack of respect, rudeness, and a wasted day.  AND I appreciate them reaching out.  That act restores some credibility.

So after a few other e-mails, I receive a few phone calls (yes they were persistent since I did not return the calls at first) from a senior leader of their customer service team.   He informed me that he had personally looked into the matter and that they would be using this situation as a learning experience for their representatives.  Hopefully my experience will benefit other customers.  The key points for me as a learning experience are as follows:

1. Provide accurate appointment data such as time, presence required, and fees to the customer for hook-up day.
2. If Stream can’t provide #1, then provide flexibility to the customer such as a courtesy call before the tech arrives. If that’s another company’s responsibility – work it out.  Stream is who I buy gas from.
3. Don’t make me call a third party.  Stream is my contact – and should handle it.
4. Ensure Stream’s customer service representatives listen to the customer’s concerns or questions.  And ensure they don’t provide vague unhelpful information.

I wish that was the end of the story.  Unfortunately its not.  And the rest of the story becomes a great case study for what to do/not do in terms of using social media for business development.

About two hours after hanging up the phone with the Customer Service leader, the same Sr. Executive whom initiated contact sent a follow up e-mail.  He kindly suggested I consider deleting my tweets and any related posts.  I kindly declined.

Here are the lessons learned for utilizing Social Media as a business strategy.

1. If you are create a social media business presence, be prepared to respond via social media  For example:
   • Visitors to your FaceBook page may not want to be a “fan” or “like” everything about your company.  Provide contact information access to your company there OR allow people to post content.
   • If you have a Twitter account for your company, be prepared to respond to tweets and questions in a timely fashion.  If you are just squatting on the Twitter handle – disclose that.
2. Establish some sort of “brand reputation” or “monitoring” strategy.  This can be an expensive solution such as Radian 6 or a cheap roll your own solution with Google Alerts.  It’s not hard and it will allow you to catch issues before they become serious problems.
3. Treat every faux-pas as a learning opportunity.  In this case, Stream did that.  Unfortunately they dropped the ball when they requested it go away.  Embrace your mistakes.  Show the world your company cares and adapts to legitimate concerns of the customer.  This will only help your brand.

I welcome any posts from Stream Energy on this matter.  I also welcome any thoughts or comments regarding Stream Energy’s request to consider removing my tweets and posts.

In the first post, “I want to be KISSED“, I performed a quick social media presence assessment.  The results of the assessment showed a few places where the existing social media strategy utilized by KISS, could be improved.  The second post, “Oshawa – KISSed, Not Missed!” explored the media backlash toward KISS for not including Oshawa, Canada on the North American Tour even though the city won the KISS fan-routing tour contest.  Oshawa is getting a concert and Gene Simmons was a little outraged at the media for spoiling a surprise.

Anyway, I received this e-mail from KISSonline about the pre-sale.  This e-mail had a different look to it from previous ones.  Hmm, need to go investigate further.  Sure enough – at least from a social media site perspective (Facebook, MySpace, Bebo, iLike, and Twitter), the sights have a more cohesive appearance.  I’d like to think someone over at the KISS organization read my first post (since I did send a copy to them) and take action.  At least someone there realized they had a disconnect and addressed it.   Kudos to KISS.

Observe, Plan, Execute

Yesterday I was reminded of why organizations need to at least monitor their brand in the social media space, even if they choose not to participate in it.  I received a following notice on Twitter from an Id that was representing themselves as a directory resource for a particular city that relies on tourism and honeymoons.  Not a bad idea from a social media perspective.

So I go to check it out – especially since they had a large number of followers and numerous tweets.  My Oh My… what a surprise… 600 plus tweets of what appeared to be randomly generated tweets which every once in a while created some images of questionable activities with Bollywood movies.  I joke not… “committed the sin of Onan with ostensible Hindi movies” and “remembers the halcyon days of grotesque nightclubs” were actual tweets.  OK,  probably not as racy as you were expecting, BUT how would you feel if these tweets were coming from an account representing your company or posing as your company?  Twitter has a new service for “verifying” accounts, however you need to justify your need for these types of accounts right now.

So it gets a bit worse.  In Twitter, you can have a web URL in your profile.  There was one in this case, so I clicked on it.  Nothing racy on the other end, but it was an incomplete website.  It looks like someone is attempting to build a directory of businesses in this tourist town.  Again, not a bad idea, but what if you are the local government or the chamber of commerce for this town and already have an official site?
This case study gives us two lessons to consider…

First, what is at stake here is the town’s brand.  Regardless of your participation in social media, if you have a brand to protect, you should at least establish a program of “monitoring” your brand.  This program could range from using Google Alerts to a more robust tool such as those produced by Techrigy or Scoutlabs.  All options essentially let you start for free.  If you have limited volume, the “free” version of Techrigy or Scoutlabs may be all you need.  I personally use a combination of Google Alerts and a paid version of ScoutLabs.  I love the graphing capability of Techrigy, but for where my business volume is, Scoutlabs is the better fiscal choice.

The next step of your “monitoring” initiative is to define how you or your company will respond to events that occur.   These don’t necessarily need to be “bad” events.  You could reward those people who really promote your business.  Or you can intervene when needed.  Its better to be informed than blind.  I call these reactions “Engagement Scripts” and they should be shared with everyone who communicates on behalf of your company.  In severe cases, you may need legal counsel.

You may be thinking that I am blowing this case study out of proportion.  Maybe the city in question was  “alpha testing” some new social media initiatives and they just didn’t have the content completed yet.  I can go along with that hypothesis, and I would encourage the company (city in this case) to test things privately.  There is no reason to flood Twitter with 600 worthless messages – it still reflects poorly on the brand.

That leads us to lesson two…  Plan your social media initiatives.  By doing something as described in this case study, you are taking a shot-gun approach to social media programs.  What are you trying to accomplish?  Who are you trying to engage?  Take the time to conduct an assessment to learn where your respective ecosystem is. The Four Quadrant Assessment Methodology (as defined by the Social Media Academy, and my personal preference) looks at where people are in the social web, sentiment analysis, key interests and reflections in the following areas:

• Customer mapping and field assessment
• Brand analysis
• Partner and alliance analysis
• Competition analysis

I’m not suggesting you get paralyzed by analysis.  Think of it as clarifying the conversations you want to have and making them meaningful.  Shooting fish in a barrel may be easy, but shooting the falls in a barrel is not one of my recommended actions.  Do a little homework and planning, then go catch your trophy fish.  I look forward to hearing about it.

Mr. Schwarzenegger has turned to his near one million Twitter followers for ideas on addressing California’s budget/deficit problem.  One suggestion was to sell excess items from the state warehouse via auction on Craigslist and eBay.  The suggestion went even further to suggest that the actor turned governor autograph the items.  This is exactly what the state is doing.

Early figures show that $1.5 Million was raised.  It will be interesting to see how the “Great California Garage Sale” impacts the economy of the state beyond the initial sales.    Regardless, the effort is an example of how social media allows the community at large to pitch in, ask questions, receive answers, and hopefully contribute to the conversation and the issues at large.

For fun, what would you have bought at the “Garage Sale”?  I think I would have  bid on one of those old “CHiPs” motorbikes, although a surfboard would probably have me on the waves again.

This is the Recorded Presentation from July 22, 2009

Topics covered:

• What business managers need to consider about social media
• An example case study for a complete social media assessment (assessing customers, brand, partners and competition).  This case study was performed by certified consultants using the methods and models developed by the Social Media Academy.

About the case study:

This case study shows that starting a social media engagement with some cool campaigns and hoping to attract some customers is counter-productive and may cause more damage than progress.  It furthermore demonstrates that without a thorough assessment – a social media strategy is almost impossible to build.

Learn to develop a holistic view of the social web and create a strategy that leads to business success and a mutually profitable customer experience.
What are your take-aways:

• A comprehensive insight in social media for business.
• Understand what you could do even if your company doesn’t have a social media strategy yet.
• Learn that the first step to social media success is an assessment and what the assessment includes.

Edited on 07/31/2009 by R. Mark Moore.
Removed registration and added embedded link to the presentation.