Breaking potential crisis: Telkomsel and its hacked website

Crisis Management Students: Fire up your twitter apps and browsers and train them on Telkomsel’s website and their Twitter responses.

Someone has hacked into Telkomsel’s website and filled it with vitriol and animal references –  and being generally lauded by netizens for doing so.

Although hacking is a crime and should be condemned. The hackers are instead getting plaudits because for years Telkomsel has been perceived to be arrogant, expensive and treating its customers with contempt.

There is a marketing and customer service lesson here somewhere that tells the story of how you may be dominant in a market but not loved. If only a competitor could get its act together and run a disruptive campaign enlisting Freedom Fighters against obscurantism, bad service and expensive service, you’d be toast.

In the meanwhile Telkomsel’s Twitter handle is telling all and sundry that they are restoring the website so people can use them again, as if nothing untoward has happened.

More: something’s very wrong or it’s just absolutely bad timing when your agency peeps posts this just as the issue is escalating.