Spark Sport’s blame game won’t win company any friends

Right after Spark Sport’s slip-up during the Rugby World Cup fixture between New Zealand and South Africa, Spark’s team went on an apology tour, admitting the service simply wasn’t good enough.

The willingness of Spark Sport boss Jeff Latch and new chief executive Jolie Hodson to front seemed at first a rare example of corporate humility — a company willing to acknowledge that it had made a big mistake.

How things have shifted.

What we’ve seen since is a level of corporate sidestepping even Anton Lienert-Brown would be proud of.

It started with Spark blaming international partner Akamai for the glitches during the South Africa game.

Then, when the audio went south during the Australia-Wales match, it was local production partner TVNZ.

This isn’t entirely new for Spark. It was quite adept at the blame game well before the World Cup kicked off.

Human error was to blame during a Black Sticks game, a satellite glitch during an English Premier League stream and an international provider was the culprit in the second half of the U20 Scotland-NZ match.

Spark’s latest trick shifts blame to its Kiwi customer base.

“All of our technical performance metrics are tracking well and the vast majority of our customers are having a good viewing experience,” Spark said on Sunday night as more angry customers took to social media.

“There continues to be a minority of customers with device and set-up issues in their homes,” Spark Sport said in response. “It is important to note these are not related to Spark Sport platform performance and we encourage these customers to reach out to us so we can individually troubleshoot their issues.”

In other words, it’s important to note Spark is not to blame; it’s those technologically challenged Kiwis who just can’t get the perfect stream flowing. So much for the customer having the benefit of the doubt.

Of course, every company has the right to explain what has gone wrong — but this all just feels a bit like Spark refuses to admit it hasn’t delivered the experience it said it would.

A classic cliche in the marketing world is that a brand is a promise, and Spark has broken the only promise it made to Kiwis. It doesn’t matter who’s to blame. All that Kiwis are worried about is watching the rugby.

And even when they’ve been able to, it’s rarely been at the quality we’ve come to expect through a satellite feed. Technology is, after all, meant to make things better, not worse.

As former All Black Craig Innes so succinctly said: “It would appear they have peddled to the NZ sporting public an inferior product.”

The entire approach is perhaps best exemplified by Twitter activities of former Spark chief Simon Moutter.

Moutter was quick to jump on Twitter to celebrate how well things were going during the Australia-Fiji match. But he’s tweeted nothing about Spark Sport or the Cup since.

The point here is you can’t claim all the glory when things go brilliantly, only to deny responsibility when things go wrong.

No matter who’s to blame in all this, the bottom line is that Spark made a promise it didn’t keep.