Uber has endured a fair amount of negative publicity this year.
In March a scathing blog from a former employee, which included allegations of serious sexual harassment and incompetent HR practice, went viral.
Then just three months later a sexist joke made during an internal meeting to address sexism resulted in another wave of negative headlines and the resignation of a board member.
Its latest crisis media management incident was triggered on Friday when Transport for London (TfL) concluded the ride-hailing app was not fit and proper to hold a London private hire operator licence – a decision it says was made on the grounds of ‘public safety and security implications’.
This morning (25/9) Fred Jones, the company’s head of cities, was on the media circuit with interviews on both Radio 4’s Today programme (2hr40mins) and 5 Live’s Your Call (39mins5sec) to put Uber’s side of the story across.
So how did he get on?
Well on Radio 4 he came across as a calm and composed spokesperson who importantly struck a far more reflective, conciliatory tone than that presented in the company’s furious statements on Friday.
Accusations of TfL ‘caving in to a small number of people who want to restrict consumer choice’ were replaced by a desire to talk to the organisation’s representatives as soon as possible and to ‘understand their concerns’.
And there was an admission of failure for the way the company had handled an allegation of sexual assault by one of its drivers, who continued to work and went on to commit another serious offence.
He said: “In this specific incident we hold our hands up. We made a mistake in that incident. We just didn’t realise when the passenger wrote in how serious it was.”
But there was no wider apology and the interview fell flat in response to questions about how the company reports serious incidents to police, with Mr Jones appearing vague and evasive on the subject:
Presenter: “Why can you not simply lift the phone to the police?”
He said: “We are working with the police to figure out how we can do this in a way that is helpful to them and they are helping us to identify these serious incidents to make sure we can report them to them.”
#r4today Hey! #Uber twonk, stop repeating the word "so"....
— Arthur ASCII (@arthur_ascii) September 25, 2017
Uber man struggling here. Close them down and better models will spring up #Uber #r4today
— Tony Smith (@SmithTonyD) September 25, 2017
#r4today sly, evasive uber representative doing best to manipulate opinion in their favour. euch. 🤢
— Torsten Louland (@t0rst) September 25, 2017
Laugh to start the day. Uber guy on #r4today saying they're working out how to tell police abt incidents. Um ... phone?
— Ros Edwards (@RosEdwards2) September 25, 2017
Appearing on Radio 5 around an hour later Mr Jones faced a longer and more wide-ranging interview.
Here again he sounded confident and composed – good assets for a crisis spokesperson - and there was a clear message of wanting to ‘sit down with the decision makers’ to resolve the situation.
But at times there was a reluctance to answer or address specific questions which made him again sound evasive and defensive.
Presented with figures which showed Met Police had investigated 32 allegations of rape or sexual assault between May 2015 and May 2016 - while there were no allegations against Black Cab drivers during the same period – Mr Jones appeared particularly vague.
Fred Jones: “So obviously we take all incidents like that very seriously. We work closely and report them to TFL…”
Nicky Campbell: “How did it happen?
Fred Jones: “And we have worked closely with the police on their enquiries to respond to those.”
In fact, Mr Campbell posed the same ‘what happened’ question three times in an attempt to move him away from his corporate line, but the closest we had to an answer was that Uber was a ‘large operator with over 40,000 drivers in the capital’. Even if he had not previously been aware of those statistics he could have said something like 'Clearly, those are very concerning figures and this is an area where we must improve. Since that time we have made several changes, including...'
Nicky Campbell having Fred Jones on toast now on @bbc5live regarding Uber driver criminality and non reporting to police!
— DonaldTrumpsSyrup (@Onmeed) September 25, 2017
It was an interview Mr Jones struggled to control from that point on and this saw him face questions about whether drivers had insurance; the employment status of its drivers, their pay, and even issues the company has experienced in other cities around the world.
And at times it felt like he used a lot of words to actually say very little as vagueness laced his responses.
What he did well, however, was refusing to be drawn into criticism of TFL, despite being teed-up by Mr Campbell, particularly when presented with critical comments from listeners.
It may appear like a small point, but Mr Jones did have an annoying and distracting tendency in both interviews to begin his responses with filler words like ‘so’, ‘now look’ and ‘well look’ as if trying to buy himself a little thinking time. These are phrases we tell spokespeople on our media training courses to avoid. It is much better to pause and collect your thoughts rather than use one of these phrases.
Ultimately, Mr Jones would have been better served to adopt more of the language used by the company's new CEO Dara Khosrowshahi in an open letter in today's Evening Standard. He said: "While Uber has revolutionised the way people move in cities around the world, it's equally true that we've got things wrong along the way. On behalf of everyone at Uber, I apologise for the mistakes we've made."
Open letter to Londoners in today’s Evening Standard from Uber’s new CEO @dkhos: pic.twitter.com/LOuLgPvF4B
— Alex Belardinelli (@abelardinelli) September 25, 2017
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