Did BC Hydro do their job to the fullest or did they mess up big time? If I ignore the first few hours where they were absolutely terrible I would give them a 9/10, pretty impressive. However the fact still remains, in the first few hours where thousands started losing power, the BC Hydro website crashed and people were left without any information at all. From roughly noon, when their website went down, to roughly 5pm, when their Twitter account became extremely active, they were not doing so well on the customer service front. At some point BC Hydro realized that people were getting angry and that their website wasn’t coming back online anytime soon. They became very active with their Twitter account and started providing as detailed information as they possibly could. Now this might not be very reassuring for someone that was sitting without power but it was at least reassuring to know that BC Hydro was doing everything they could.

At 10pm when they posted a PDF with estimates of when power would be back, people at least had a timeline to look forward to. The only problem was that they couldn’t live up to many of these estimates and have had to push them back multiple times. Their twitter account since yesterday has remained extremely active since 5pm, providing every update possible. They have in fact even setup a temporary page on their website to keep customers updated.

We estimate that 530,000 customers lost power at some point during Saturday’s windstorm – one of the biggest single-day storm events we’ve ever experienced. We’ve restored power to more than 350,000 customers in 24 hours.

We have more than 400 people working on restoring power including over 250 power line workers. We have brought in crews from all over B.C. to help including crews from Prince George, Kamloops, Smithers, Terrace, Vernon, and Vancouver Island.

That is what their website currently says along with providing the latest PDF file of estimates of repairs. People that are sitting without power still might not care about all this and just want their power back but by keeping everyone as informed as possible BC Hydro has done a great job avoiding a PR disaster. Their will still be people that complain but there is no way to avoid those people. In fact many people are complimenting them for their updates and thanking the hard working crews.

Update: August 30th 11:15pm, at the latest count according to their Twitter account, 90,000 customers remained without power.

Update 2: August 31st 9:00pm, 24,000 customers still without power. These are the areas that suffered the most damage. Just under 50% of the customers are from Surrey. The BC Hydro website is now fully back online.

Update 3: September 2nd 4:35am, “We estimate that 710,000 – nearly 50% of our 1.4 million customers on Vancouver Island and the Lower Mainland – lost power due to Saturday’s windstorm. The storm is believed to be the single largest outage event in BC Hydro’s history.” Power has been restored to all but 100 people.

Source: BC Hydro; BC Hydro

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Translink has a terrible brand image in the Greater Vancouver area and they have done very little to try and repair that. On top of that the attempts they have made to repair this brand image have actually made it worse. The residents of Metro Vancouver simply do not trust Translink with anything. The entire no side campaign was more of a target at why we cannot trust Translink with our money rather than why we don’t need this tax. One of the most important aspects of Marketing is brand image, if your prospective customers (or in this case voters) don’t like your company or the way it operates they will always choose against you. In this case many people don’t like Translink so they voted against giving them an additional $250 million a year for 10 years.

I’m not hear to say whether I think this bad image is earned or not because that does not matter, what matters is they have a bad brand image and this needs to be fixed. The yes side of the campaign spent potentially millions of dollars trying to convince people of the benefits and why they should vote yes but all in vain because people were voting against Translink not against improvements to infrastructure. Many companies do not realize how important brand image really is but they should try to think about it from a consumer point of view. If you really hate a company are you going to buy their product if you have a choice? If you give consumers a choice and have a brand image like Translink’s the odds are not in your favour.

Yes I’m sure some of these people did vote no against the tax all together not Translink but if Translink had a better image the vote would have been a yes more likely. Translink needs to put in major work on improving their image. Doing things like firing the CEO that everyone hates for a failed compass card roll-out but keeping him as a consultant with full salary and hiring an interim CEO with the same pay really does not help with improving your image. Crown Corporations, companies like BC Ferries and Translink which are 100% owned by the government (basically Crown Corporations), and not for profit companies always come under extra scrutiny for these types of things and should try to be more careful where their image is concerned. Not for profit companies are very careful with their images but Crown Corporations are basically monopolies so they usually don’t care because if you want to take a bus from UBC to Metrotown Translink is your only option. It is only at times like this when they realize that they should have cared.

Update: A poll that took place the day after the results came in (July 3rd) indicates exactly what I have stated above. 76% of those who voted no did so because of their lack of faith in Translink. 62% said that the way Translink operates needs to be reformed. Two things stood out to me from this poll and slightly surprised me. 72% of yes voters said they did not trust Translink either but basically said the pros outweighed the cons and 53% of no voters also said they don’t trust the Mayors’ Council either. You can read more about the poll at the second source link below.

Source: BIV; BIV 2 (Update)

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