Transparency Tyranny

In January of this year, TrendWatching, one of my favourite sites, suggested that Transparency Tyranny would be a big thing. For those who don’t follow the site, they are referring to the decreasing time it takes for anything someone – especially a large company – does before the reset of the world knows about it. If a customer has a bad experience in your branches, transparency tyranny makes sure that that customer can reach an audience of hundreds, maybe even thousands, to talk about the experience.

For a bit of work I was doing here at the bank, I recently had cause to look at what people were saying about us in various online communities. And I found out something very interesting: our staff are actively writing about us and their work and trying to turn around the negative comments that some people have left. I was not surprised, given that I, too, write about my work at the bank.

This post, entitled “Please don’t hate us too much” is especially sanguine and interesting. It details life behind the counter, and tries to put the view of a teller. It does it successfully, in my view. The author, Toniq, is a housewife, mother of 4, who works part time.

But what I can tell you, is that our Toniq and our other people are posting in these forums without the formal permission of the bank. They are doing it anonymously, of course

At present, we have very few people at Lloyds TSB who are actually blogging under their real identities, and even fewer who talk about their work in public via the medium. It is possible, in fact, that I am the only one at present.  I have permission, but even so, this blog is specifically disassociated from the bank in the disclaimers on the site. I may be an employee, but when writing here I write as an individual.

The thing with this trend to transparency tyranny is that – as can be seen with the post above – it is no longer possible to pull down the cone of silence. People will speak about whatever they will regardless. We are lucky that, for the most part, we’ve got staff who are being supportive.

I very much admire the efforts of Vancity with ChangeEverything. As an experiment, I tried my usual searches to see what kind of sentiment people were expressing about this institution. “Vancity Hate”, “Vancity bad” and “Vancity crap” all returned nothing especially negative. When you do the same with Lloyds TSB, there’s much to read. Even given the difference in our size, the Vancity approach – providing a community forum (which is actually a moderated environment) - seems to have attracted a positive halo.

So it seems it is possible to address transparency tyranny in a positive, directed way. That’s something that we, at Lloyds TSB, are still getting our heads around. In the meantime, I guess we’re grateful to the anonymous Toniq and her ilk for putting the point of view constructively from our side.

As a final note, by the way, we haven’t said our people can’t write about us in public. We just haven’t said they can. And that’s an important distinction, I think.

Comments

[Richard Bowler]

Under the banner "please don't hate us too much" and bringing home the personal touch of various employees do you think we could have a moderated community such as the one you describe on the LTSB intranet?

[William Azaroff]

Hi James, thanks for the comment about ChangeEverything.ca. No one posts negatively about Vancity on that site, but if you Google Vancity Customer Service, we have had our scrapes with people blogging negatively about us.

If you read through the comments on the post that comes up when you perform that search, you can see that we tried to engage the community about this topic, but the post became a lightning rod that we opted not keep up with.

[Iowa_John]

How does increased corporate transparency interact with the issues you describe above? Seems like someone with an axe to grind might be able to combine bad feelings re: customer service with cherry-picked data from annual filings to create a real problem.