Social Media Monitoring: Rebuilding Trust, WFC Case Study

Were you ever lied to?
How difficult was it for you to fully trust the person that lied to you gain?

I will argue that if the story of the boy who cried wolf were reimagined for adults, it would have ended thus:  The wolves tired of the anxious boy's warnings, attacked him first instead of the sheep he was herding. The towns people were awaken by the boy's agonizing cries as the wolves devoured him limb by limb.

The same is true in any relationship in which one is considered a liar. The liar has to prove his innocence ever time an issues of trust arises until he regains the confidence of the people he deceived. Once a liar, always a liar (possibly).

So how difficult is it to regain trust? I want to investigates this using Wells Fargo's (WFC) Commitment Campaign as a case study. I will provide a little overview of how Wells Fargo (WFC) lost the trust of its customers, then share its ad campaign and related webpage to restore customer confidence, and lastly I will analyze social media (SM) to attempt to shed light on the impact of WFC commitment campaign.

About WFC

Wells Fargo & Company (NYSE: WFC) is a diversified, community-based financial services company with $1.9 trillion in assets. Founded in 1852, Wells Fargo provides banking, insurance, investments, mortgage, and consumer and commercial financial services through more than 8,600 locations, 13,000 ATMs, online (wellsfargo.com), and mobile devices.  

About WFC Scandal

Pressured into meeting cross-selling goals, WFC employees opened over 2 million fraudulent customer accounts without those customers' consent. Customers were charged fees related to the fraudulent accounts. WFC defrauded millions of dollars from its customer over the course of five years, and possibly extending back to 2005. Furthermore, the total damage to customers is immeasurable at this moment. It is presumed that the scandal raised customers' cost to borrow. The implication is that this scandal affected customers' credit standing.

Response to WFC Scandal

WFC was fined $185 million dollars (a drop in the bucket for a company that is the 7th biggest public company in the world). It was ordered to repay customers, and prosecutors are contemplating criminal charges. WFC fired 5,300 of its front and mid-level employees associated with the scandal. The executive of its retail banking operations retired, and the CEO resigned. Full timeline of the scandal is available here.

This scandal will continue to haunt WFC for the foreseeable future. A report projects that 14% of current WFC customers intend to switch banks. This is significantly higher than industry average switch rate of 7 to 8 percent. It is projected that this scandal will cost WFC billions more dollars in the form of lost business.

Social Media Response:

First, keep in mind that banking is unattractive to the average person. As it should be. When there is magic happening in a bank, it is most likely cooking a deadly meal. If we investigate the WFC brand over 2016, we see the trend is pretty flat for most of the year, there is a bump here and there in line with industry movements. Below is comparison of WFC, BoA, and Chase. We see that as the scandal unfolded WFC trends higher compared to the industry - Sept 18-24 (data from Google Trends).

The boost in WFC's trend is partly associated with the exposure of its fraudulent activities. That big boost above is also seen below when the terms "scandal, investigation, and fraud" were included in the search. In this case in which we can observe the trend of the brand in association with negative search terms, we can conclude that the trend is mostly negative. 

It would be an understatement to say the town's people in the cloud sphere went crazy. People were talking in September and they are still talking about the WFC scandal - that is why I am writing this blog. You will have to live in an alternative universe to find any positive comments in relation to the exposure of WFC's fraud. So what were people saying. You would have to intentionally misinterpret people's tweets and Facebook (FB) posts to find any positive comments related to this scandal. See for yourself.

This was a clever comment that WFC did not bother responding to. Remy wrote this in response to the WFC stagecoach.

WFC Responds with Commitment Campaign.

In response to the scandal, WFC aired an ad campaign promising to renew its commitments to its customers. The company launch an associated webpage to apprise customers of the activities WFC is carrying out to regain customer confidence.

How effective is this campaign? It is hard to directly ascertain the effectiveness of this campaign as WFC disabled commentary on the above YouTube link. However, as we learned, you can never silence the people. So let's inspect elsewhere for chatter about this ad.

Ursula sums up the feelings of WFC customers, observers and analyst.

WFC posted its commitment campaign message on its Facebook page with a link to its commitment webpage. This posting received 1.1K likes, 2.2K comments, and was shared 234X as of the posting of this blog. If we aggregate the commentary, we notice a very negative trend in the comments section. We can speculate that the 1.1K likes associated with this post was from employees pressured to like the post or risk losing their jobs - I would call this the social media boiler room.

In fact, all of the comments associated with their Sept. 20, 2016 post are negative with the exception of WFC's responses. WFC's response to customers' comments sounds automated. The formula is simple: acknowledge the person, apologize, offer to assist via private message (PM).

The irony is that WFC commitment page which should have served as a customer centric webpage doesn't allocate any space for customer interaction. It provides zero social features. No forums, review sections, voting buttons, or suggestion tab. Horrible start so far. In an attempt to rebuild its relationship its customers, WFC has become deaf to those customers' concerns.

Even potential customers are dissatisfied with WFC. Potential customers complain of delays in mortgage processing.  I will share just a few of the 2.2K comments that I found of interest in relation to the above WFC campaign post on Facebook.

Lana captured the mood of most commentators on the WFC commitment post on Facebook. Most are asking WFC, you just stole millions of dollars from your own customers, how can we trust you?

Recall that the formula I observed in WFC responses to customer comments is acknowledge the person by name, apologize, and offer to help via PM. Even in the extreme example below involving the death of one of its customers, WFC continued with its dispassionate (heartless) response.

However, most customers are dissatisfied after they have engaged in PM with WFC via Facebook.

Hugo and Luigi above have come to see this commitment campaign as more of damage control and less about making actual changes, such as recommitting to core customer values. Customers have caught on to WFC robotic responses as well.  Some noticed the WFC reply messages were originated from India. Others found the redundant use of female names in WFC's reply signatures as suspicious. Here is an example of each.

What to make of all of this?

WFC got caught red handed stealing its own customers' money. WFC's response will serve as a case study for years to come on what NOT to do in mitigating a crisis.

First, don't wait until regulators expose you to reconcile with your customers. Admit your wrong and immediately begin damage control. Second, firing front line employees is a horrible first step in damage control. It doesn't settle well with anyone, current employees or customers. We are all aware of how big corporations work. There are checks and balances, there rarely is only one hand or team involved in any business function. My previous post discussed how this parsing of responsibility has absolved corporate employees of criminal liability.
Every corporate company has internal auditors. Make sure that your auditors don't become the  red army, a strong arm that suffocates any dissenters. Clearly order them to not retaliate against internal whistleblowers. Third, make a statement by firing the CEO and any other C-level executive that could compromise your attempt to rebuild your image. It is vital that you shape your customers and the public's perception. Your third acts sends the impression that you are diligently working to right the wrong by starting with a change of leadership.  It is important that your send a strong message. Lastly, make sure that promises you make are clear and sincere. Vague commitments such as we are 'making changes to makes things right again.. we are renewing our commitment to you,'' are seen as empty words and lies from thieving bankers unless customers are involved in creating your commitments.

Wells Fargo has lost some of its lifelong customers and potential customers to its retail banking scandal. Some of those relationships may never be repaired. Some customers are vowing that they will make sure no one in their family ever does business with WFC. There goes a generation of potential customers.

WFC reverted to what most of out off touch big companies do when their business is stained by internal corruption and greed. Run a TV ad campaign to rebuild brand trust. That may have worked in a different era, but this is the era of social media, the era of the groundswell, the era of collectively trolling you when you F**k up.

If WFC truly is committed to its customers, it should start by listening to them. Yet, we learn it is behaving on the contrary. The website it created for its customers lacks any social features, no chat room, forum, or even a blog, no customer engagement. In social media, it reiterated its campaign commitments. When people engaged WFC on SM, WFC responded with dull automated messages signed by robots with female sounding names. WFC should assign a cross-functional team to monitor its social media accounts to better assist its customers. WFC disabled comments to its commitment ad on its YouTube page. One would think that WFC would like to know how its TV ad is perceived by its customers. Did we click with 'em?  WFC fake sentiments are as visible as its fake accounts. WFC, you should upgrade your stagecoach to the 21st century.

For anyone still considering sticking with WFC or joining as a new customer, maybe Susan Werb can talk you out of it.

Disclosure note- my approach:
I have attempted to investigate the impact this campaign in real-time at socialmentions.com and icerocket.com. However, the results were inconsistent with the search terms. For example, when I searched for Wells Fargo Commitment campaign, Wells Fargo TV Ad, and Commitment Ad, the results ranged from zero  up to 108 hits, and most of the hits were from unrelated Photobucket photos on commitment. However, I found only one hit that specifically attempts to discuss the commitment campaign. The difficulty in assessing a campaign that has past is that it is in contrast to the intent of real time SM monitoring services such as social mentions and icerocket.com.

I believe this qualitative representative truthfully presents the impact of the overall commitment campaign. I am open to debate the veracity of my statements.

Bank responsibly.