This is the end of the story.

So to finish the story then.

If Vahinkovakuutus did finally give me the recording and based upon my girlfriends wishes not to publish it, i decided not to. The whole incident upset her quite a lot. So as not to make her feel worse i will leave it here.

However the basic content of the message was as remembered and described earlier in the blog.

If Vahinkovakuutus certainly implied that we were covered and gave examples of what was covered and sums of money. We were never told that we were not speaking to an If specialist and a generic customer service provider. We based our decisions of how and when to return home based upon this information at significantly greater costs to ourselves.

So with this and If´s continued resistance i decided to stop the effort here. Now the story is here and complete make up your own mind about what you think and if you wish to, try and learn from my successes and mistakes.

As far as the social experiment is concerned i certainly was succesful in a number of ways.

I did manage to generate interest in the story and traffic to the site.
I did manage to create additional pain and embarassment for If Vahinkovakuutus
I managed to use social media to publicise my story and certainly empowered myself more that through traditional channels.

In this respect the experiment was a success.

On the downside this did consume quite alot of time. There was no framework for me to follow, no examples of how others had tried to do the same thing. As a consequence i certainly made mistakes.

However the main things i learned through trial and error are,

You cannot force a story to go viral, you can enable it but people will only spread it if the content is relevant to them. In this respect a customer complaint story perhaps is not the best medium as this for the most part is a very personal thing and generally not too interesting to none engaged parties. To gain attention a story has to be so shocking or highly relevant to an audience to attract interest.

If you do attempt this kind of engagement, do not try to manipulate your channels too much for example repeated junk twitting does not work, asking people to perform tasks in your own interests does not work and should not be tried. Allow your story to grow organically based upon the content and style of writing and you will be succesful without having to resort to manipulating your own audience. This is something that i myself learnt the hard way from time to time during this process.

My advice is however to use statistical tools to follow how your actions perform. Ultimately this is the only way of measuring your success, especially if the party you are engaged with are silent or not acting how you would like them to act. Blogs and google analytics are a good starting point.
Well that is it, the blog navigation has been updated so that you can find things of interest to you. I hope you enjoy. Signing off.....

Until the next time a company ticks me off ;-)

I have re-opened the dialogue with If Vahinkovakuutus

It is with very mixed feelings that i have reopened the dialogue with If vahinkovakuutus. If you have read my previous conclusions from my first attempt to engage them you will understand why.

In my opinion If vahinkovakuutus have publically shown themselves to be very untrustworthy, unethical and entirely non customer orientated. In any case as If vahinkovakuutus have still not given me the recording of the phone conversation that this whole experiment and engagement has been based upon then i have reopened the dialogue via their facebook pages to try and get it back.

I had not expected this course of events would be necessary but apparantly it is. Below is the screen shot of the new conversation. If vahinkovakuutus seem to be ignoring it currently. Again this can only serve to damage their public image further.

View the conversation on Facebook.

Social CRM Company Engagement Framework Part 2: Strategy

Once you have decided that you wish to engage a company in a dialogue via social media, the first thing to do is to think a little about your strategy. If you do this you will dramatically increase your chances of being succesful.

Formulate your Argument

You must have a clear concise reason for engaging the company in question. You must be able to communicate this in a very short concise way and as a few lines or bullet points. You must do this to succesfully engage your audience and the company alike. Whenever you discuss your arguments try and do it as shortly as possible.You will be more succesful when you activate your audience by describing how it impacts them personally so try and emphasise the impact on other customers in particular.

Make clear, short requests to what you expect the company to do. It is harder for the organisation to avoid short concise requests. By doing this you will be able to stop the dialogue becoming pages of boring marketing spin that your audience is not interested in.

Make sure that your arguments and requests are clearly summarised in all social medias you engage in.

Plan your use of social media

So as to be better able to plan this you need to do and think about two main things.

1. Search for all social media used by the company in question and decide how to use it for your own means.
2. Decide on which social media you will create for yourself and for which purposes you will use that.

Advantages to utilising the company's own Social Media

1. You can hold the conversation in a public forum in front of the company's own audience.
2. You can piggyback on the company's own popularity to bring traffic to your own site where you can tell your own story. (See post).
3. You can apply greater pressure to the company to act (note only when you have a valid argument) (See Rules of Engagement)
4. You can embarass the company publically in front of their own audience if they do not act in a professional and considerate way. (See my own conclusions for If Vahinkovakuutus)
5. You can disrupt the company's own marketing messaging through utilisation an interference strategy.

Advantatages in utilising your own Social Media

1. You can tell the story entirely in your own way
2. You can have full control of all content being produced
3. You can utilise your own marketing and promotion channels to generate further interest
4. You can provide a permanent record of the dialogue and the story. This can either be something the company is proud of or is a thorn in their side.

Based upon the above criteria for using either your own or your company's social media you can make a decision how best to utilise each channel. I will post my own thoughts about how to best utilise the main channels and the advantages and disadvantaged of each in subsequent posts.

Main Strategic Tools

For the most part you will find that companies will have a presence on these tools.

Facebook group or page
Twitter
Google + (new but will become important)
LinkedIn Company Profile
YouTube Channel
Blogs.

Company's will probably be present in other channels but for the most part 95% of their audience should be present on at least one of these medias. As such i would recommend focussing on these. This is as the return on your time spent on other channels probably means it is not worth you focussing your efforts on those. Generally if a company is present in these channels then you should strongly consider making your own presence felt there.

If they are not there maybe you should still be, especially for Google +. In this way then you need to set up your own corresponding channels. In later posts i will describe how these corresponding profiles on the same channel should interact with each other and how to utiise each to its best advantage.

Should you make your presence felt in all the company's Social Media in the beginning.

Choose one channel to hold the conversation in. Facebook is good as almost everyone has a profile and you are able to maintain the dialogue in a thread and link to it. In the beginning of the dialogue you do not need to be present in the other channels.

There may be an advantage in moving into these channels later as you need to increase pressure on the company.

However by being present in these channels immediately, you may have an advantage as you can apply maximum pressure to the company immediately. By doing this though you also increase the likelihood that the company will feel like they are being attacked.

In my opinion you are most likely to get your positive response in the first few replies. After this the probability of succes will drastically drop. As such you may consider expansion of your utilisation of Social Media later if you do not get replies that you are satisfied with.

You need to Raise Attention as Quickly as Possible

One thing is clear. To increase your chance of success, you need to get as many people involved and active in regard your story as quicky as possible. This of course is the main driving factor in deciding how to utilise the social media and other traditional marketing channels in question. This is also a major reason for planning your actions first!!! The relative strengths and weaknesses of each channel will be discussed in upcoming posts.

You will need to ensure that you yourself produce good content and attract a wider audience

If you want to attract large numbers of visitors and support then you need to expand the scope of the story. People are generally not all that interested in a sustained bad cusotmer service story. You need generate content that will be of interest to people outside of the company's existing stakeholders. If you can expand outside of this target group with large enough numbers then you can apply significantly more pressure to the company.

To be succesful in this you need to be creative and think outside of the box. For my own story i turned this experience into a social media experiment. In this way i was able to attract an audience based upon the company's own stakeholders and an audience interested in Social CRM, PR, Customer Service, Marketing and Social Media. In this experiment this effectively doubled the level of traffic i experienced to my blog for example.

Ensure the longevity of your story

As mentioned above if you add content to your story via media such as blogs you ensure that not only does the story survive but that it is also relevant for others. As such the fact that your story will continue to attract traffic will apply more pressure to the company in question. They are less likely to act unprofessionally if they know that their story will survive and be found and read long after the dialogue is over.

Where do you want to steer traffic?

This is a tricky issue. You obviously want your audience to be active and to participate and be visible to the company you are trying to have a dialogue with but you also want to be able to tell your own side of the story and activate your audience. As such.....

Do not attempt to drive all of your new traffic straight to the company's own social media.

This may seem contrary to your goals but remember, for audiences reached through channels other than the company in questions own social media, they have not heard your side of the story you have not been able to influence them so that thay may feel like they want to act. For example it is very difficult to get someone to act based upon 160 characters in Twitter. They need more information to act upon.

As such I recommend steering these new audience to a location where you can outline your own side of the story and a media that you can control. In this experiment i used a blog. Once they have read the story then they are more likely to be activated in the discussion. In this way you can then steer them to the company's own social media where ideally you would like them to make their presence known to the company.

Analyse your own Performance

Use tools that will help you get statistical data about traffic volumes, referring sites/urls and locations, shares, likes and retweets that will help you meausure the success of your own campaign and let you know how successful you are at generating interest. Blogger for example offers these as default functionality for all blogs. In this way you will also be able to measure how much interest you are able to generate from the company's own social media locations. All of my upcoming channel posts will give information about how to analyse these channels also.

Interlink your own blog to the company's social media at every opportunity.

Whenever you have an opportuntiy, use your blog to drive people to the company's social media and conversely ensure that your social media is at the top of the company's social media's feed. In this way you can ensure a good flow of traffic between the two and the probability of activating visitors increases. This will also undoubtedly add more pressure on the company to act positively to your requests.

Focus on Improving Numbers Visible to the Company

Blog stats are only of value to you in terms of improving your marketing efforts and channel performance!! That is unless you make them visible to the company. Numbers that may affect and influence the company's behaviour and response to you are for example, number of twitter followers you have, number of comments, likes, mentions on their own/your social media. Number of members of your facebook group. Traffic generated to their own website through your blog. These are things the company should be looking at through their own analytics and these are the things you should be attempting to influence. Bare this in mind when measuring your own performance. The company will measure the risk to them through data visible to them.


What if a company decides not to engage you?

This is a serious conern. In my own experiment If vahinkovakuutus broke contact for a period of several days. I think they believed that i would just disappear. As a strategy to force them to re-engage i expanded my use of their own social media so as to start to interfere directly with all of their messaging.

In practical terms i commented and added my own material to all of their social media posts. I kept to the rules of engagement however and did not write any negative comments but merely asked the audience had they heard bout my story and linked to the blog.

I also blogged about it and put it out on Twitter. After two days If vahinkovakuutus, Finland re-engaged me.

What if a company decides to block you from their social media?

As above if a company blocks you it will look bad upon them as long as you have followed the rules of engagement. The simple strategy is to create another profile and continue to post. Also write about it and post that information via your own social media. This negative publicity will hopefully result in the company returning to dialogue.

What if you start to lose your audience?

Unfortunately if you lose the support of your own and/or your company's audience then you are in serious trouble. The ony advice i can give is to try and stop doing anything that you may have done to alienate them and apologise publically. However if you continue to lose support and especially if the audience start to publish content against you then i am afraid it is over. This is the time to stop. It sucks for you but the probability of being successful if this happens is almost zero. This is because the company will believe the people are on their side.

Social CRM Company Engagement Framework Part 1.The rules of Engagement

The purpose of this framework is to guide individuals who wish to engage companies in a dialogue related to a particular conflict or service request. Usually this framework will be employed after conventional channels and dialogue has failed or broken down. This is due to the additional effort required by the customer to implement this framework over and above that required by the companies own conventional channels. The idea is that by moving the conversation to a public arena i.e. a social media run by the company then this will further empower the customer and increase the likelihood of a succesful outcome for the customer.

This framework has been constructed based upon lessons learned through the engagement with If vahinkovakuutus a Finnish insurance company in relationship to travel insurance claim that If refused to pay.

Part 1: The Rules of Engagement of Social CRM from the Customers Perspective

Operating in the Target Company's Own Social Media

When engaging a company on their own social media the following guidelines should be applied.

1. Only engage a company in this way when you have a valid argument. This is not a strategy for just venting your anger or trying to get some revenge.
2. Do not alienate your audience! Remember that when you are communicating with a company on their own social media, their audience is also your audience. You should be attempting to win them over with a valid argument. By gaining their support you will put additional pressure onto the company in question. As such do not do or say anything that may risk you having the audience turn against you.
3. Remain calm do not show your anger. Undoubtedly in this kind of situation you are experiencing feelings of anger and hostility. Displaying these will not help you at all. Do not post offensive or derrogatory comments about the company in question. If you do, you risk being percieved as an angry customer who justs wants to have a rant.
4. Try to avoid opinions and stick to the facts. When you add your opinion to much you increase the risk of alienating your audience. Let them make up their own minds. This is difficult i know.
5. Express how the experience has made you feel. This, if done in the correct way, will help garner support for your cause and generate sympathy from the audience. It makes it easier for them to empathise.
6. Express and highlight how the company's behaviour impacts their other customers and stakeholders. This adds weight to your own personal story and argument and further distances you from being perceived as an individual upset and angry customer.
7. Outline your arguments clearly and concisely. When you do this is it very difficult for the company not to answer you as this will reflect badly upon them if they refuse to engage you.
8. State clearly what you expect from the company and what actions you require for them. Numbering these helps (in a long thread for example). Ask them directly to respond to each. In this way you can avoid the conversation being taken of topic.
9. Attempt to control the conversation as if it were a debate. If a company does not directly answer your concerns, questions or requirements pull them up on it and request that they answer the questions directly and if pushed ask them to answer yes no.
10. Do not allow the company to steer the conversation away from your requirements. This is a diversionary and delay tactic. They know that at some point in time you will get tired.
11. Do not allow the company to steer you away from their social media and into hidden channels. You have failed already in these hidden channels. This is just a way for the company to get rid of you. If a company attempts this it will reflect badly upon them not you.
12. Do not give up until the dialogue is really at an end. Badly run companies or companies with something to hide will ultimately continue to avoid the questions. If you keep pulling them up on this you should be able to to garner more support form their audience and add additioal pressure to the company.
13. Be prepared that the company will not meet your expectations. In this case you still win. You have lost nothing but your time. As long as you had a valid argument, if the company does not resolve this issue for you then it is them who ultimately will come out of this worse. Even if you are financially out of pocket you still would have been even if you had not engaged them through social media. As a customer you had nothing to lose so try to think of it that way.
14. If the company does meet your expectations and resolve the case through social media let them know your gratitude. Post this publically. In this way it will help the company appreciate the value of serving cusotmers in this way and also let others know that this kind of strategy can be applied succesfully with this company.

Operating in your own social media

As part of this framework it is a strong advantage to adopt your own social media related to the engagement process. This is so as to tell your side of the story, preserve a record of the dialogue that you are in control of. In affect you are running your own campaign from where you can publicise your story and garner further support by leveraging your own socail media. More about this in a later post.

When utilising your own channels, it is more acceptable to be biased and slightly more opinionated. After all you are trying to push out your marketing message related to this story in the same way that a company uses their own media to push theirs. By being more oppinionated you will also generate more interest and discussion around the subject. This is also to your advantage.

As well as the rules of engagement from the aforementioned section, you should also be aware of the following.

1. Again avoid alienating your audience. How you behave in these channels is important you do not want to be seen to act in a way that is underhand, coercive or in a way similar to that of the company you are trying to engage. You should not profit financially from the engagement process other than for any compensation you are attempting to get from the company you are engaging. If you do this will damage your argument and own image.
2. Show gratitutude to all who participate and engage them in conversation. Anyone who comments or replies to you deserves a thankyou or a return comment if posting on a blog for example. Of course dependent upon the media you are using.
3. It is ok, not everyone has to agree with you. Do not attack people who disagree with you but engage them also you can learn about why they feel that way. By having an open dialogue with a real discussion you will actually draw more attention to your story. If you are receiving a lot of negative feedback you can use this to evaluate if you should continue your engagement process or not.
4. You need to behave in a the same way that you are expecting your engaged company to behave. Your actions need to be transparent and you need to be trusted. You must set an example.

If Vahinkovakuutus Social CRM and Customer Service Conclusions

I am slightly cutting with tradition here and skipping the analysis and jumping straight to the conclusion. I will add stats and analysis later along with my Social CRM Customer orientated Engagement Framework (i may need to come up with a shorter name). I will base this upon what i have learnt in this experiment and with an eye to enabling other customers out there to learn from my mistakes and engage companies through social media successfully. This will be added to the blog in installments during the upcoming weeks.

IF Vahinkovakuutus Customer Service Conclusions

One of the goals of this experiment was of course to get customer service via social media and Facebook in particular. I will start by summarising my thoughts with regard to this.

How did this score as a customer service experience in terms of technology?

Well in terms of my own experience of having to wait for responses it is no different than any other chanel a company may have you operate in. You write your question and wait for your response so in this respect it is the same as email, phone, web portal or even face to face conversation. This is as almost always the response is, "we will get back to you". This means that actually the experience is not so much affected by the technology but more by the company in questions own practices. However for me personally, it is a more than acceptable form of communication and fits with my own online presence. It is convenient and more so than having to remember passwords or logging in securely to a dedicated service which in itself causes added pain. Not really a good place for passing secure documents but a nice place to have the conversation.

How did the experience score in terms of  the service i received from If Vahinkovakuutus?

As i will discuss this in terms of SCRM in the next section i will just approach this in terms of general customer service.

With If vahinkovakuutus's responses i was annoyed in the delay in responses to my questions. Particularly where at one point they disengaged for two days and then still did not answer my questions. This made me feel like they were just ignoring my concerns and they were just hoping i would go away. This gave me the impression that they were childish. I was not attacking them i was not slandering them i was attempting to engage them in dialogue and discussion with what i felt was a valid argument.

I was also frustrated by If vahinkovakuutus's almost constant effort to get me off Facebook and force me back into their conventional channels. If vahinkovakuutus seem to only want to use Facebook as a marketing channel. They do not really want to engage me as a customer and they certainly do not want anything that could be perceived negatively there. What they do not understand they themselves can affect this perception by their own behaviour and how they react to the content that is placed there.

I was particularly disappointed that If Vahinkovakuutus did not want to publish results publically with regard their review into using a third party for their emergency customer service or for their lack of customer service in their shops. This just made me feel like they were not actually going to do anything and their promise to investigate this was just PR. I believe that they were not listening at all and i am left with the feeling that nothing will happen. I always felt like If vahinkovakutus had something to hide.

I was also very disapointed that, even though If admitted that they made mistakes, they still refused to compensate me for the costs that their miscommunication had caused me. This is something i just cannot get my head around to be honest. Basically the message i received is too bad we do not care!

Also the they refuse to even discuss any changes to their terms and conditions. I requested that they should,  accept liability in the case if incorrect or misleading information supplied by them. This just makes me feel sorry for their other customers.

Finally, two weeks ago i asked for a copy of the phone call that If based their decision not to pay on, this has still not reached me. This suggests to me that they have something to hide or are afraid that i will publish it. This gives me the impression that If vahinkovakuutus are not a morale company and you cannot trust them.

Social CRM Conclusions

The main goal in this experiment was to engage a company through their own social media and to see, if by doing so, the customer has gained more power in the conversation than through conventional channels.

In this respect i think that although my own personal goals of changing If vahinkkovakuutus's behaviour for the benefit of their other customers and gaining compensation for myself were not succesful i believe the experiment has been. This is why.

Having engaged If vahinkovakuutus through their own private channels i was unsuccesful in achieving my personal goals. I was not going to get my money back anyway, so in this respect nothing ventured nothing gained applies. All that this has cost me is my time.

More importantly by engaging If vahinkovakuutus in this public space i brought awareness to my cause. By gaining support i was able to apply pressure to If vahinkovakuutus above that that i could have through their own channels. From this factor alone the probability of success must rise even with the real danger of annoying them. This is because all of the advantages are the customers. The cusotmer has nothing to lose That is as long as they do not alienate their audience.

This strategy also has the power to benefit the company through excellent customer service (as so often  has been demonstrated) and has added value as a marketing tool. However the strategy also allows for the company to be embarassed publically and to devalue their own brand and disrupt their messaging. This has additional potency of course as the conversation is held on the company's own social media and infront of their own stakeholders. This is the worst case scenario for the company and involves the largest risk and cost for them. This of course depends upon how the company themselves behave and the ingenuity of the customer. Unfortunately for If vahinkovakuutus i feel that they fall firmly into the second category. If vahinkovakuutus have embarassed themselves and eroded their brand equity. This is why.

If' vahinkovakuutus's poor performance is not only about the poor customer service experience that i received (as discussed above) but also from their own attitude towards the use of social media. At all turns they attempted to get me off their Facebook group. They did not want to engage me there.

For some time, the fact that they tried to ignore me and hoped i would go away, is also a very immature attitude to this kind of dialogue. However in this situation i was able to diversify my strategy on their facebook page and other social media to interfere with their own marketing messaging. I believe that, this was the only reason that after two days they did re-engage me. In the social media world there is nowhere for them to hide and in this way the customer is empowered when they act in a civilised way. Again this must always be in a dialogue and never slanderous or you will lose your support and alienate your own audience. It is hard to do sometimes but, it essential to avoid losing your temper. You must always consider how you are perceived as an individual.

If vahinkovakuutus were aware of the risks of blocking me on the Finnish Facebook group. I had forseen that this may happen and had a backup plan but did not have to use it. I was however temporarily blocked from the other If Insurance local social media Facebook pages. I do not know where this decision came from but it says something about If's corporate culture with regard social media. Rights however were returned when i noticed and blogged about it. This again indicates a degree of empowerment. In terms of appearing as a caring socially responsible company this is of course totally unacceptable behaviour. The content that i added was of course not explicit or offensive to any of If's audience.

If vahinkovakuutus clearly only see social media as a way of pushing out their own message and they wish to control it at all cost. They even asked me not to post content related to my blog.

Sorry no you cannot control social media.

Facebook is a public forum, you may start the conversation but you should not try to control it. If vahinkovakuutus seem not at all interested in engaging customers in dialogue especially things that relate to their poor performance or things that are painful for them. Actually i believe this is a Finnish trait generally. This type of engagement is of course one of the mantras of Social CRM. I wonder if If vahinkovakuutus had ever heard of social CRM before this experience. One thing is for sure, they have now.

Additional benefit gained from engaging If vahinkovakuutus in the social media world is also in terms of the company's own costs related to the claim. By prolonging this claim i increased If's own financial costs for this claim dramatically and in all likelihood substantially more than the value of the original claim. This is another factor that empowers the customer. In traditional channels it is easy to diengage a customer when you have had enough of them. In the social media world it "looks bad" so it is harder for a company to do so. This means that as a customer you can continue to force the company to incur additional cost in handling your grievances and increase the pressure on them.

What was the ROI for If vahinkovakuutus?

How have If vahinkovakuutus come out of this experience? Financially the actual costs for handling the claim must be way above what they would have been had they just paid the claim in the beginning. They have also had a lot of negative publicity targeted at their own stakeholders and a permanent reminder of their poor performance preserved in this blog for all time and thanks to my SEO efforts this should be visible to people who search for If Vahinkovakuutus for the foreseeable future.

On top of this i can see from the stats that about 30 people visiting the site clicked an insurance related advertisement. Statistically and based upon the source of my traffic at least half of these were If customers or stakeholders as they came from If's own Facebook pages.  I would love to know if even one of these customers switched from IF to a competitor as a result of this. This is a cost to If i cannot measure and only guess at.

Furthermore as half half of my traffic came from the UK and US and none of these are If countries this is probably the first that those people have ever heard of If vahinkovakuutus. As such this is the first impression that will affect their image of If vahinkovakuutus as a brand. You know what they say about first impressions. This becomes even more pertanent if If vahinkovakuutus decide to venture into those markets.

Really it beggars belief that a company could be this stubborn, childish and damn stupid. As a manager i would have settled in the beginning taken the opportunity and sold the marketing story. I would have eliminated all risk from this. Especially as the customers case is a valid one and the original value of the claim was only 500 euros. I thought insurance companies were big on assessing risk and ROI.

Well it just shows me that even in the face of a valid argument (by their own admission) they will not put their customers first even when it is in their interest to do so. I just cannot understand this, it makes no sense at all.

What was my own ROI for this Experiment?

Well personally i did not do well, i was unable to turn over the claim decision and admittedly i spent a lot of time on this. However i have learned alot about how to engage a company and i can share that with others and i will. This blog is an enduring testament to that.

In the upcoming weeks i will add new content here that will outline a Social CRM engagement model/framework from the customers perspective. The purpose of which is to show customers how to succesfully engage a company in dialogue pertaining in particular to Social CRM. I will also add more content related to analysis of channels and statistics. In this way customer's everywhere will be able to learn from my mistakes and successes to engage with their own service and product providers.
Perhaps then the ROI for me is in terms of legacy. I hope that others can learn from this experience and apply some of the techniques. I also hope that companies themselves will learn from this and learn how to and how not to engage customers. At least everyone (including me) should learn something about Social Customer Relationship Management.

Conclusion

During this process i tried to find other examples of someone trying this kind of engagement and was unable to do so. All of the literature seems to have been written from the company's perspective in terms of their marketing successes. As far as i know this is the first time a customer has deliberately attempted to engage a company in an organised dialogue and not a rant and as part of a wider self organised social media campaign. Of this i can be proud.

As a final note, i managed to gain 50% of my traffic through If vahinkovakuutus's own social media. This meant i was able to target their own audience, on my site, with insurance advertisements from If's competitors. Originally this was to increase the pain to If vahinkovakuutus. Although the revenues are small from this endeavour (a few cents so far) and profitiability was not the point of this experiment, in about 100 years i should have recouped the losses originally caused to me by If vahinkovakuutus. In this respect on a long enough time scale this endeavour will not have cost me anything. This means the only costs were incurred solely by If vahinkovakuutus.

Well done If, we salute you! Sometimes when you win you lose and sometimes when you lose you win. Given a long enough time scale of course.

Summary of My Dialogue with If Vahinkovakuutus

Discussion held on If's Facebook Page

So that future and new visitors to this blog can get a quick overview of the story and the dialogue that took place between If Vahinkovakuutusyhtiö in Finland and myself i have decided to write a summary of the discussion. Just the highlights.

This will also act as a sitemap of sorts and let you easily navigate to posts that you may want to read more about. So here are the highlights.

February 5th 2012. Malev go bankrupt, we are stuck in Turkey. We call If Vahinkovakuutus Emergency Customer Service

We travel to the airport discover that our flight has been cancelled. We call If vakuutus's emergency customer service and are led to beleive that everything is ok and that we are covered. We were told to pay the costs ourselves and claim when we get home. In response to this we buy very expensive flights home the next day in the belief that If vahinkoivakuutus will pay. See post.

February 6th 2012. We make our claim and If Vahinkovakuutus inform us that they will not pay.

We fly home and make the claim on If's web service. After a week or so we receive a large envelope from If vahinkovakuutus with a thick bundle of terms and conditions and a decision not to pay. See Post.

February 14th 2012. We visit the If Vahinkovakuuutus shop for personal customer service

We visit an If vahinkovakuutus shop to discover that we cannot get customer service related to claims there. If offices only sell insurance and they do not address your customer service needs as an existing customer other than to sell you more insurance. See Post.

February 15th 2012. We call If Vahinkovakuutus's customer service number

We call If vahinkovakuutus and they say that they will investigate and get back to us. They send us an email the next day saying they have heard the phone conversation and as they did not promise to pay and based upon their terms and conditions they will not pay. See post.

I also requested the copy of the phone call conversation on this day.

February 18th 2012. I start the blog and engage If Vahinkovakuutus on Facebook.

After feeling totally ripped off and having bought really expensive flights home at additional expense to myself. I decided to start this blog and engage If vahinkovakuutus on their own Facebook page This is deliberately in a public forum where If could not hide. This is also the first day that If respond but it is a "we will get back to you message" See Post. However i also see this as an opportunity for If Vahinkovakuutus and write a post describing that.

February 20th 2012. If vahinkovakuutus's First Real Response.

• If vahinkovakuutus admit that they failed in their communication (accepting liability in my eyes)
• If still refuse to pay as in their terms and conditions they do not pay travel insurance when companies go bankrupt (what is the point have travel insurance)
• If Vahinkovakuutus try and get me off their social media by directing me down other channels that they can control (Nice Social CRM)
• I respond by saying that i want to resolve the case in this public forum and ask, is it really the customer's responsibility to pay for their admitted mistakes. See post.

February 21st 2012. If still argue that their terms and conditions state that they can't pay

• If vahinkovakuutus stick to their terms and conditions argument
• They state that it would not be fair to pay this for their other customers.
• I reply with concrete demands of what i expect and re-emphasise that this is not about the terms and conditions. I expect payment because of the false and misleading information supplied to me and the resulting additional costs i incurred as a result of this..
• At this time i also write a post about Finnish culture with mention to adherence to rules and customer service. See Post.

• I supply If vahinkovakuutus with a concrete list of my expectations from them
• Change your terms and conditions so the If Vahinkovakuutus are liable for giving out false or misleading information. This is to protect their other customers.
• Review and publish the results on Facebook relating to not outsourcing their emergency customer phone service to an unqualified third party without detailed knowledge of their policies.
• Review and publish the results on Facebook relating to not offering personal face to face customer service relating to claims in their If vahinkovakuutus shops.
• Settle the claim and pay my personal costs incurred as a result of information supplied to me by them.

February 21st-23rd 2012 If Vahinkovakuutus are silent

• After no word from If vakuutus i believe that they are not going to answer me and are waiting for me to go away. (Again nice Social CRM).
• As a result of the silence I engage in a strategy of interference in their other Social Media conversations. See post
• I believe that If vakuutus have lost any opportunity they had to turn this into a social CRM success story. See Post.

February 23rd 2012 If Vahinkovakuutus re-engage me but don't answer my requests

• I will never know the reasons for why If vahinkovakuutus decided to re-engage but they did.
• They again try to get me off their social media saying they do not want to handle it there and wish to do it privately. (I bet you do). Again nice social CRM, isnt SCRM about the customers needs?
• They do not answer any of my questions but agree to pass the feedback forward.
• I again ask for a copy of the phone conversation which this discussion is based.
• I try to help them by also supplying a link demonstrating how to engage a customer through social media. See Link. See my post on the subject.

February 25th 2012 If vahinkovakuutus request that i stop linking to my Blog

• If vahinkovakuutus request that i should not publicise my story on their social media.
• Sorry no you cannot control a public forum. This is a place for customers to engage you on their terms. This is not your own private marketing channel. This is not your website. Very nice social CRM once again.
• I agree to stop interferring with their other marketing messaging on Facebook while they engage me in this conversation.See orignal post.

February 27th 2012 If Vahinkovakuutus can you please just answer the questions!

• After getting pretty tired of If vahinkovakuutus i start a new thread as the conversation was getting a bit long and congested.
• I simply reiterate the questions I asked to them on February 21st and request that they answer them Yes/No and with their justification. I want to bring this to an end i have wasted enough time on If.
• See post.

February 28th 2012 If Vahinovakuutus reply with an answer a politician would be proud of

• If vakuutus give a reply that is basically marketing drivel about your feedback being valuable. They do not answer any of the questions.
• I request again for them to answer them with simple yes/no answers.
• My post is not very flattering of If Vahinkovakuutus. I am getting quite tired of engaging If for over 2 weeks and getting no where.
• I notice on the same day that i have been blocked from If Insurance's other regional facebook pages. After posting on the subject my user rights are mysteriously returned. Again nice social CRM. As a reaction i post the story to If's competitor's Facebook pages. See my post on the subject.

February 29th 2012. If vahinkovakuutus's final response and Mine

• I receive a final response (see post) from If stating that they will not handle this in the public areena
• They do not answer any of my questions
• They again try to drive me off the social media to another channel they do not want to discuss with me anymore.
• I post my last comments to them in the dialogue. I am not very flattering of If unsurprisingly.
• If's silence and refusal to answer the genuine questions concerning not only me but their other customers tells me more about If Vahinkovakuutus than anything they have done so far. Their Social CRM behaviour has been of a very poor standard.

February 29th 2012 If Vahinkovakuutus have the last word

• Upon cancelling my insurances with If and moving them to Pohjola i discover If want to charge me 30 euros to do so. They claim that this is to stop people cancelling their insurance after only a few months. I have had my insurances with them for years. Nice customer service touch once again, well done.

I still have not had the recording of the conversation as is my legal right and cannot verify anything that If vahinkovakuutus have stated regarding that conversation.

View the original If Vahinkovakuutus conversation threads on Facebook.

Part 1 here
Part 2 here
What do you think about If Vahinkovakuutus? Find them on Facebook

Still Time for If Vahinkovakuutus to add insult to Injury

If Vahinkovakutus will even try and rip you off when you leave. You cannot trust If at all

Nice story relating to cancelling your matkavakuutus. Thanks again If Vahinkovakuutus. A nice touch to end my pain with you as a service provider.

View the feed on facebook

If Vahinkovakuutus charge you 30 euros to cancel your Travel Insurance with them even though you have had it for years. Nice Customer Service once again!