nPower – how to create negative publicity
June 17, 2010 10:39 am Website Accuracy, Website StrategyReaders of Martin Lewis’ MoneySavingExpert may have seen this week that there was an offer to win a free £400 fridge. The offer was perfectly genuine (http://www.moneysavingexpert.com/deals/free-energy-efficient-fridges) and the added attraction is that nPower wouldn’t use your details to cross-sell to you.
However, when trying to go to that website, even a couple of days after the offer was first announced, I was greeted with the page shown below …
While it’s a tick in the box for having a decent looking error page, you do have to wonder why such a huge company are still having technical difficulties with their website two days after the offer was in the public domain. It makes you wonder how many people they have working on the technical side of things and how such incompetence can be allowed to happen. It also makes you wonder whether such incompetence may be replicated in other parts of the business.
Although this particular promotion has no intentions of cross-selling to other services that nPower provide, what impression are they sending out by having a website that can’t cope with traffic levels and has clearly had problems for a couple of days? If nPower try to sell me something in the near future, I’m likely to associate their name with inefficiency and so would be less likely to respond to them positively.
In this case, nPower are the unlucky ones to be highlighted but it can equally apply to any other business that doesn’t put processes in place to cope with demand, or that doesn’t have a plan in place to fix problems (such as a website page or site being inaccessible). The same rules as ever apply – don’t make yourself highly visible online if it’s going to come back and bite you.