Good PR

Biscuit Banter

I never try to hide my love of Aldi. I'd shout it from the rooftops if I could get up there. Today, I fell in love with the discount supermarket brand just a little bit more.

When a brand gets its interactions right on social media, it can be a beautiful thing. A recent response that the Aldi Facebook team sent to a customer on the social platform was perfectly on-point. The cool kids would probably call it “on fleek“. I, however, have no real idea what that truly means.

Darryl Reilly was settling down one morning to enjoy a cup of tea and his biscuit of choice; some chocolate digestives. Three biscuits in, something frightful happened; the next biscuit he pulled out from the pack was a plain digestive with no chocolate on it whatsoever.

He took to Facebook to message Aldi about the biscuit tragedy:

Other brands in similar situations, when faced with a funny customer complaint, may have just taken a generic approach to the response ... but not Aldi. This was the reply Darryl received:

Darryl was later sent a new pack of chocolate digestives and an Aldi bag of sugar, given that he'd admitted to purchasing the last bag at Tesco. The brilliant sense of humour demonstrated by the Aldi Facebook team and the witty reply captured the attention of plenty of people and media outlets, amassing thousands of likes and shares and appearing on the likes of Mashable, Metro, Mirror, Yahoo! and The Independent.

Bad PR

Email Enemies

Telecoms giant EE landed itself in hot water this week, after one of its employees made a heat-of-the moment decision to send a somewhat sweary email to a customer.

It all started when 18-year-old Charlie Doherty called EE to enquire about upgrading his phone to an iPhone 6. After being told that he wasn't eligible for the upgrade just yet and also that his account was in arrears, he tried to make a £35 payment over the phone to make up for a late bill.

However, the EE call handler allegedly refused to accept the payment over the phone. Mr Doherty then apparently hung up after muttering an obscenity. I won't go into detail, but the phrase rhymed with 'duck you, you runt'. You get the drift.

The customer claims he was the one who was hung up on, but who knows. Anyway, getting to the juicy part of the story now! Moments after the phone call ended, Charlie Doherty received an email from EE, reading "This is an email confirming that your order with EE has now been cancelled and any refunds required have now been raised. Same to u ur a f****** c***. Kind Regards EE'. Again, if you need some help understanding what those starred out words could be, they rhyme with “plucking stunt“.

So, the ballsy call handler obviously decided to edit the generic EE email, making it a lot more colourful. I'm sure that customer service reps at any company have to deal with a lot of riled up callers, but this one failed to remain professional and clearly seized his chance for revenge. His actions probably got him the sack and definitely made EE look fairly bad in the media. The Sun, Metro and Daily Mail had already picked up on the story at the time of writing, with others sure to follow suit.

Someone pass EE a bar of soap to wash its employees' mouths out with!

Shannon Peerless, 10 Yetis, @ShazzaYeti on Twitter

Seen any good or bad PR recently, you know what to do, @10Yetis on Twitter or andy@10yetis.co.uk on email.