On a weekly basis Standard Bank (to whom regrettably I am currently a customer of) phones me to sell me products that I am already a customer of, or that are irrelevant to my profile. Every time I ask them to exclude me from their spam marketing list, but they continue to phone me (read spam). In one week I even received three calls selling the exact same product.
Last w
eek I had enough and tweeted on my negative feelings towards them. Samantha Perry (@samanthaperry) sent me a tweet suggesting I contact @standardbankgrp. Within about two minutes Brandsh contacted me via email to resolve my problem.
It’s a #Win that it took them two minutes from me tweeting to them having found my details and contacted me. However not all was kosher, Brandsh contacted me on behalf of Standard Bank on their own email addresses. My compliant is with Standard Bank, I want them to respond not some 3rd party. Also the issue should have been resolved the first time I asked a consultant to mark me as do not contact on the system.
This is where it starts to get dodgy
Brandsh asked me to give them my banking account number via email. Huh? Consistently my bank is warning me about phishing scams and reminding me to never give out details and now some other (random?) person not working for the bank is asking for my account details over email? Wanting to see what the bank was up to I willingly passed over my details 
.
About 30 minutes later I got a call from Standard Bank (did I just not complain about you always calling me?) asking me to explain what my issue was (I just did that via twitter and email, but I take it that the bank themselves never got that, sigh).
The next day
Standard Bank has recently been taken to task on the social media front with the start of the Standard Blank community
Standard Bank has recently been taken to task on the social media front with the start of the Standard Blank community
I got sms spam from Standard Bank, and took the same compliant route. The response from Bransh was that they didn’t know of any SMS campaigns that day (great). Got another call from the Bank, again they had little idea why they were calling me, so decided they would call back after I explain my problem. Later they called (again) back and said it would take up to a month for their system to update (you’ve got to be kidding me right?).
Key take outs
• Fix your traditional query resolution channels, customers will spam your online ones if it’s the only channel they get addressed on. This will quickly ruin your online reputation.
• The company should contact the customers, not a 3rd party. Not to say that a 3rd party like an agency should be advising the company the whole time.
• 3rd parties should follow the company they represents practices (in this case asking for account details over email is surely not in the banks policies).
• I love the investment in social media, but brands should first looking at fixing their internal processes before spreading spend even thinner across more platforms.
• Make sure to pass all the facts along down the resolution chain, its highly frustrating consistently repeating the same stories
• Lastly set rules for the number of times a single customer can be contacted with marketing materials and communicate all brand touch points to all your agencies
