Bell’s TV re-brand disconnects

It’s been a little over  a year since Bell Canada re-branded their satellite TV service, changing the name form Bell ExpressVu to simply Bell TV, as part of an over-all corporate re-branding. At the time Bell’s President and CEO, George Cope, said of the new brand, “it’s a straightforward and customer-focused brand that directly supports the Bell team’s goal: To be recognized by customers as Canada’s leading communications company.” It’s also a classic example of a company completely misunderstanding branding to its great expense.

In 2008/09 Bell put millions into a new logo, new ad spots and new names for a handful of its business units. But they didn’t actually change the brand at all. That’s because the brand is the total experience of dealing with your company; not just the colour of the drapes. Customer perceptions of your company will not shift if your customers’ experience doesn’t.

And if my  recent experience with Bell TV (nee ExpressVu) is any indication, Bell’s customer experience hasn’t changed, at least not for the better.

Without wanting this to turn into a personal whinge about a bad experience, here’s a quick outline of what happened when I tried to upgrade my existing Bell TV service to HD:

• It took 4 calls to  get a sales rep who could accurately explain the packaging and pricing of Bell TV HD channels.
• Bell Store staff emphatically assured me that no upgrade to my dish would be required; a service call and a dish upgrade was in fact required.
• There was no online support information that describes the process and the technical requirements for upgrading to HD.
• Out of 4 attempts, the online self-service tool for upgrading programming was unavailable.
• When the online self-service tool was available, it would have cost 300 percent more to upgrade programming online than it did over the phone.

If this is at all a typical experience, then a multi-million dollar re-branding exercise has been undone by an unwillingness to spend a fraction of that upgrading the real brand — the customer experience.

Leaving the training issue aside — and I definitely appreciate the challenges of training a global outsourced workforce of thousands — it would have taken a relatively trivial investment to upgrade Bell’s online self-service systems to a point where this experience would have gone the other way.

How much would it cost to create online self-help guides to walk consumers through the process of doing common tasks (there must be hundreds of customers a week upgrading to HD)? How much would it cost to offer a discount — rather than a high premium — for upgrading programming online?

Not much. Less than $100K, for sure.

It just takes a shift in the mindset of brand marketers to realize that a brand is more than an ad campaign and a logo. A brand is the customer experience, and more and more that means the brand is the online user experience.