I’ve seen some replies from them on Twitter that are so clearly ignoring the initial tweet as to be borderline rude. People asking questions being given copy/paste ‘thanks for your feedback’ responses, and I’m not talking about veiled questions or difficult people - I’m talking about genuine members of the public. It’s really quite remarkable.
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I didn’t say closing the forum was a big FU, I said they have a whole ‘FU’ attitude over the past few months:
We have a new shiny Debit Card and we’re letting you all know first (yay)
P.S. You can’t have one any time soon and we’re not going to tell you when (which will now be even more delayed because of the BA thing)
P.P.S. When we finally get Post Office Deposits that we’ve been fobbing you off with for quarters (rather than months), you still won’t be able to use this feature because you need the new Debit Card which we’re in no hurry to give to you.
The Green Button. Yes, we know you all hate it and we’ve come up with a rubbish excuse about discovery (which seemingly isn’t a problem for iOS users) but balls to the lot of you we’re just going to ridicule this whole thing to wind you up a bit more.
I can’t think of more examples right now and I can’t look at the forum which being us neatly to:
I don’t think anyone has said transparency = forum.
But removing the forum and not even putting it in read-only mode, blocking the use of text messages and e-mail updates on statuspage.io and lying to customers on the forum and CS chat definitely are not examples of being transpartent. Quite the opposite.
Again, can’t think of more examples off the top because RIP forum.
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At least we have a response on cheque imaging it seems.
Not sure what ‘an idea’ is, as the big banks already do it pretty well. But not coming soon that’s for sure.
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Ouch
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I have been following both S and M communities for many months but never logging in or commenting for quite some time. However, I will say that it has never seemed to me that there was necessarilly any validity in the notion that, with either community, those who particapated in either, or both (and there were quite a number of the latter) they the community as-a-whole was actually representative of the whle (members of either bank wth an active account. In the case of Starling I thought the numbers were very small; always the same individuals posting. It seems the typical social media chatter where participation, showing off and attracting attention wheigh heavy.Starling never invited criticisum on the basis they would alter their plans to suit the compainants but it became ovious recently community members were mostly on a journey to confront Starling. I am not surprised the community was closed. Long term I don’t think it will matter. Monzo holds a deep affection for it’s community. I am a bit surprised how much it is welcoming dissafected Starling members - or am I?
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To be honest, the Twitter feed is very much like the community. If you have praise you can get a quick response, if it’s not praise you get ignored or fobbed off. To be honest, I think the staff just wanted the anonymity to say what they want without it being attributable to them directly, as I believe the same ‘community managers’ run the Twitter account.
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I wouldn’t hold my breath.
It took me months to close a business account. I resorted to social media and the community before it actually happened.
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The same can be said for a lot of the people who continuously complain about something on every possible social media, and forum related outlet.
I think the Starling staff have shown some pretty good restraint when you see the same people who ripped everything apart on their forum, start to do the same on social media as well.
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- Monzo has over 700,000 more customers, and yet the Monzo team still manage extremely well to run the community, social media channels as well as working on always maintaining the high standards we have come to love Monzo for.
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Surely people complaining with their own account isn’t anonymous in the same sense? Staff are now hiding behind @StarlingBank, so if they want to be smart or get testy it’s @StarlingBank and not @theperson (for example).
I accept it can be difficult to see criticism of many things, but it’s often the nature of public relations and social media. If they wanted to respond, nobody would have stopped them, in fact everyone would have welcomed them. I think the only restraint shown has not been saying what they really think, which has been alluded to a number of times.
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and this is one of the reasons why the forum failed. A lot of posts and threads were made in desperation because Starling’s CS is so dire that people felt the need to ‘kick off’ on the forum and Twitter in order to get stuff done and quite often it worked (rightly or wrongly). Perhaps if Starling handled the CS better in the first place they’d be less negativity, which is on balance what you get over here because Monzo’s CS is absolutely fantastic.
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Anyone can have a twitter account - It very rarely shows the real person.
Too many people seem to hide behind a username, and feel absolute fine to go on the offensive whenever it suits, forgetting that they aren’t dealing with a faceless organisation, but in Starling’s case, a small group of social media staff (very small), who have to deal with the fall out.
Constructive criticism is fine - But to continually attack, time and time again through different media outlets is… Well… Bordering on trolling.
If people don’t want to use Starling, that’s absolutely fine - I see no benefit in chipping in to every other tweet about how bad they are (whilst claiming the moral high ground).
With respect, I think that’s fundamentally the wrong way of looking at the situation.
Yes, there are usual suspects - both on the erstwhile forum and now on social media - who are forever dissatisfied. There are also loads of folk who have genuine cause for complaint.
Let’s not forget that Starling created the forum. They encouraged interaction. And they could have dealt with this earlier in at least two ways: either engaging with users and addressing the cause of dissatisfaction (be it a genuine dialogue or a firm ‘no’ we’re not doing that) and/or moderating their community properly to weed out folk who crossed the line.
The point is they needed to own it and take responsibility. It’s not good enough to just blame the user. I think that we can agree that they have taken decisive action, but I think it’s fundamentally wrong to place the blame exclusively at folk on the forum when Starling had every opportunity to turn it around. They chose not to.
And I understand that customer service roles can be difficult - and I have empathy with those on the firing line. People can be unreasonable - are frequently are - but ultimately if you’re in the customer service game you need to support your staff and encourage them to win people around. I saw no effort to do that.
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I’m not sure if anyone is attacking their every tweet; if they are then that’s not really a productive use of time. Personally, I think the forum suffered from their refusal to get involved (a lot of negativity was generated because they didn’t get involved, so it was their own making). If I had to self-censor I wouldn’t get involved either, so I don’t blame the staff.
Kris started to get more involved and was very open over the last few days; I thought this was a step in the right direction and people welcomed his own thoughts. Nobody tried to use what he said against him, and his ‘human’ responses were a breath of fresh air. I suspect his comments may not have been viewed positively within Starling and I hope he wasn’t reprimanded in any way.
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Yes. Non stop complaints! 
At the end of the day, the number of people who genuinely used that forum a lot were few and far between.
The ones who are angry by this decision, are the ones who contributed to it’s demise (note: contributed, not caused).
I’ve seen plenty of responses on twitter from people saying “never knew you had one”, or “used it once, that was it” - It’s really only affected a few people - Most of whom are now venting here.
We can agree to disagree, I guess it comes down to perception.
My point was that you still see the same people sending negative messages to Starling (now through Twitter), rather than the forum - I just don’t know what it’s going to achieve?
The Monzo user base and forum seems polar opposite to Starling’s - Hence the conversation that is happening here.
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On balance, I probably agree with most of this!
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Why would the negativity and frustration go away completely just because one medium has been closed?
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It won’t - The frustrations will still be there.
Perhaps I’m just someone who prefers to give a relatively new company a bit of leeway on certain things - Especially if I have an interest in the business, and want to see them grow.
In the same way I’d give Monzo leeway on things that haven’t happened yet - Payee management anyone??
Chipping away relentlessly on the forums or social media isn’t helpful (and I’m not talking about the constructive chipping away - That’s fine).
I don’t think you’re engaging on the key point - that this was all within Starling’s control and should never have got this far - so I’l just say repeat that they could have recovered it, could have grown it, could have seen it as a resource. They didn’t.
We’re going around in circles a bit, so I’ll leave it here 
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This, exactly.
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