Vodacom gives MTN a serious Twitter schooling

South African cellular giant Vodacom has given MTN, its chief rival in the space, a serious lesson in using social media as a customer service channel.

When Nicholas Burger, who is a portal manager at music streaming service Kleek, failed to get any meaningful assistance from MTN’s call centre, he did what most customers do and turned to social media.

“How do I get a HUMAN customer support agent. 173 does not give options on problem I’m having. #Frustrated,” he wrote in a tweet to the official MTN South Africa account.

Reasonably enough, MTN replied by directing Burger to its customer service account, which is supposed to handle all technical inquiries. What was not reasonable is the fact that MTN took three days to send that response.

Read more: Vodacom, Deezer tie the music-streaming knot for South Africans

By that stage, Burger had already moved over to Vodacom and told MTN as much. According to Burger, Vodacom responded with a tweet welcoming him to the network “seconds” later.

“How funny…,” he wrote in a Facebook post detailing the exchange. “Well done Vodacom social media team for being ON the ball! Seconds to reply to a MTN South Africa complaint that took them 3 days to reply too”.

Of course, Vodacom isn’t immune to customer service issues. Seasoned journalist Mandy Collins recently penned a blog post detailing the frustration she felt while trying to resolve a data issue with the mobile network.

In a follow up post on Biznews, she describes feeling that she had been “handled” by both the customer care team and Vodacom executives.

“And here’s the problem – whether you’re Vodacom or anyone else – people are not idiots,” she writes. “They know when they’re being handled; they know when you’re handing them a pile of steaming bovine faeces and pretending it’s chocolate cake”.