Today we talk with 3’s senior communications team about how the company differentiates itself in a crowded market, if providing a music service aligns with brand values – and why a bad reputation for customer service hasn’t changed the way it runs its helpdesk.

After the recent launch of its MiFi device, the company has been working closely with users to test its in-store customer service, collateral and product quality. Sarah Pope, Head of Consumer PR talked about why they’ve been doing this. “We’re seeing how well can respond. By bringing together small groups of people – some really techy, some that would never sit in the early adopter category – we can test out our entire buying and usage process. It’s important to me that we can use this information, and there’s no point in doing this if we can’t implement the results.”

It’s refreshing to hear that 3 is so aware of the importance of senior buy-in, as many comms teams – both internal and external – struggle with this. Pope went on to explain that even though it’s a risk to put the brand ‘out there’, the business really wants to know what people think about its products and how to make them better.

The mobile voice space is more saturated than ever, and finding out what customers really want – instead of imposing a brand’s own thoughts – is key. Even with this on her side, how does Pope deal with the challenge of differentiating 3 in such a noisy industry?

“Being the smallest and last to market, we’ve had to carve out a very different position for ourselves. We can act quickly and respond. Everyone internally is now on the same page with regards to what we believe in and where the opportunities lie. If you look at the Skype partnership, the business side of the organisation sensed the potential in that as well and led the way for us. It makes our life a lot easier.”

While on the subject of high profile partnerships, NMA confirmed this week that 3 is to become the UK’s first mobile carrier for music streaming service Spotify. We asked Hugh Davies, Head of Corporate Affairs at 3, whether this was an attempt to maintain its reputation for working with ‘up and coming internet brands’ or if it was part of a longer-term strategic move to bundle this type of feature into its offering.

“We’ve always been involved in music, just more on the content side. When I joined the company three years ago, we had the biggest online music store (and still do actually). Now, people have realised that there are so many different ways to listen to music. We’ve let that run, as that sense of choice fits with 3 brand.”

One of the recurring issues that 3 has to deal with is a poor reputation in terms of customer service. With 90% of the team responsible for this based in India, how does the company respond to claims of employees having ‘trouble understanding simple questions, but still being arrogant, pompous and rude’ or that ‘3 have no grasp of the idea of rewarding customer loyalty’.

“The reason that our helpdesk operation is based abroad is that we worked out that a customer is far more likely to call a 3G operator than 2G. This is because of the sheer complexity of services; it’s not just talk and text, a smartphone has multiple apps and features. Providing support for that just isn’t scalable for over 4 million customers and it would be incredibly prohibitive. It would also up the price of each contract,” continued Davies.

He said that there will always be ‘some people that just don’t like the idea of it’ (having a call centre abroad) and that 3 could do a better job of explaining why it’s there, as well as helping staff with performance. It’s interesting to note that from Davies’ perspective, the Australian service team – which sits on the same floor as that of the UK – has a far better reputation with customers. This could be reflective of the attitude of the nation as a whole, or it could simply be because one team is better than the other – there’s no accurate way to measure it.

To wrap up the discussion, we asked Davies why he thought there was such a vast amount of agencies talking about the reputation space in comparison to brands themselves. “It doesn’t surprise me. Over two years ago I referenced data that said comms people were only looking at new media because they felt they had to, not because they saw it as important. Good agencies will be pushing brands they work with on issues where they see opportunities and threats forming.”