Sony – A Modern Fable of Terrible PR and Customer Relations

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Back in August 2011 Sony announced their high end Nex-7, a mirrorless, interchangeable lens camera to lead the existing Alpha series. With a hugely impressive feature list the Nex-7 became arguably the most anticipated camera of the year, packing in DSLR features and quality into a more compact body.

Sony also announced that the Nex-7 would go on sale to the general public in October later that year, but with the terrible flooding in Thailand hitting the Sony production chain they were unable to meet this original time frame. Across the web there was widespread disappointment, but obvious understanding of the unforeseen circumstances.

Since then however Sony have consistently demonstrated their ability to alienate and frustrate their loyal customers. As we approach the end of January only a small fraction of customers have received their Nex-7, but the real issue is the total lack of communication from Sony on when additional stock is due or inconsistent statements from service staff and retailers alike.

Many customers who pre-ordered the Nex-7 back in October are still waiting for their item to be shipped. This in isolation is not what is most upsetting to people, its the fact that Sony have constantly failed to deliver on their commitments and aren’t providing a regular communication (of any kind) to help people understand when stock is next due.

With social media being such a strong force on customer sentiment and brand perception Sony have really missed an opportunity to side step a major PR fail here. Instead they’ve really annoyed a lot of people and damaged their brand significantly.

The leading forums and websites in the photography industry are awash with criticism and negativity aimed at Sony. What have Sony done about it? absolutely nothing, except continue to add further fuel to the fire by their lack of communication and conflicting statements from employees in their own organisation.

A classic example in the last few days was in Canada where the Sony Canada site suddenly changed their stock status of the Nex-7 to “in stock” prompting a general flurry of orders and hope that a number of items were available. As it transpired, they actually had no stock and once again let down a ton of customers who now have to choose between cancelling their order or sitting on a pre-order wait list without any clarity for when the product will actually be in stock.

There is even some people questioning whether this was simply a tactic to generate pre-orders in the midst of a pending release of the Fuji X-Pro early in 2012.

What Should Sony Have Done?

Sony should be tightly managing their own communications around Nex-7 availability right down to their individual Sony Centres, rather than allowing rumour to drive excitement and then ultimately disappointment.

Sony also need to consider their own internal communications carefully because retailers and service centre support agents are all quoting completely different time frames. I called Sony UK recently and they told me the next shipment was due at the end of January, but then many other retailers  and local Sony support contacts are saying February or March – which is it?

Sony should have stuck up a blog or a single global location where updates could be provided about Nex-7 availability (hell, even Twitter or Facebook could of been a start). Not only would this have appeased the vast majority of customers, it would have benefited them in terms of direct web traffic and brand interaction.

A good example of this in practice would be at element14 where they launched a single group dedicated to providing information on supply as a result of the recent disaster in Japan. This single source helped to collate individual responses from all of the leading electronics companies and ensured that customers had the information necessary to understand any further impact to their own supply chains.

How difficult is it for a large electronics company such as Sony to replicate this rather simple technique and keep its customers informed?

People aren’t looking for cold, hard dates….a simple, yet semi-regular set of updates giving some rough estimates with lots of caveats would probably appease the vast majority of people.

Sort it out Sony….

Stock Check Links:

WEX photographic (Warehouseexpress.com)

Jessops

DigitalRev