Reputation Management Online

If something comes down your chimney on christmas eve, it could just be somebody’s else bank statement courtesy of Santander Bank who have admitted sending 35,000 customers to the wrong addresses following what they termed a printing glitch. “Glitch” is the banking term for a monumental customer service cock-up from the bank with nearly the worst customer service reputation in the UK. Santander is the Spanish bank that seems (“seems”) to have avoided the Spanish property meltdown and has gone on a bit of a buying spree since 2007 buying the UK bank/building society Abbey. Since then it has managed to obliterate the bank’s customer service reputation regularly polling at the bottom of customer service surveys.

You really wouldn’t want to be a reputation manager at Santander. The bank has failed to deliver on many of its promises and the brand has picked up little traction since the massive rebrand over the past few years. Of course, bank reputations have not really recovered since 2008 and for most customers, one bank is equally as bad as another. However banks try to position themselves as a “friend for life”, most customers know that the friendship does not extend beyond the first second of an overdraft and they know that all banks are exactly the same!

Santander are likely to be fined heavily by the regulators at the FSA for their latest failing, but it would change the core challenge for banks to make themselves more central to their customers’ lives in a positive way.

Related posts:

1. Financial Reputations There’s something very odd about the world that financiers live...
2. Bad Customer Service? 82% of customers will leave you! Brand value is all about what people experience of the...
3. U.S. Airways don’t forget how easy bad service gets around the net It’s funny how the simplest lack of customers service or...
4. The Brand and the reputation management how they are connected Companies spend years building a name for themselves or developing...
5. From a popular PM to the shortest-serving leader in Australia – Where did Kevin Rudd go wrong in managing his reputation? It was only a year ago that Kevin Rudd was...