Halifax loses customers over pronouns

Halifax plc is a bank in the UK which was founded in 1853.

 

It became a public limited company in 1997, with its shares trading on the FTSE 100 stock exchange.

Halifax opened a Twitter account in September 2010 and now has 120,400 followers.

 

Halifax mainly uses Twitter to respond to questions and complaints from customers. However, it also promotes its financial products on the social media platform.

 

In the past, Halifax used to have large call centers employing hundreds of people to deal with customer queries and complaints.

In 2022, Halifax posted a tweet saying “Pronouns matter” with a picture showing an employee’s name badge with her preferred pronouns underneath her name. 

 

Halifax announced that they wanted to show their support for the LGBTQ+ community by doing this.

However, many customers of Halifax bank criticised the tweet, stating that they did not agree with Halifax’s ‘woke’ ideas and its ‘pathetic virtue signaling’. 

 

A Halifax employee responded to the criticism on Twitter by suggesting “… if you disagree with our values, you’re welcome to close your account.”

Understandably, customers reacted angrily at being told they should close their accounts. 

 

Hundreds of Halifax account holders switched to rival banks and cut up their Halifax credit cards.

Howard Jones, the face of Halifax adverts in the 2000s, said, “That’s not the Halifax I knew, that’s not the customer service I knew. If this had happened when I was working there, we’d all have been shocked and disappointed. It’s a service industry – you should leave politics to the politicians.”

Questions

  1. Define the term external communication. (1)
  2. Halifax became a public limited company in 1997. Explain one possible reason why Halifax chose to become a public limited company. (3)
  3. Analyse how Halifax can benefit from using social media as a method of communication. (6)
  4. Outline one way Halifax may have been negatively affected by this example of poor external communication. (2)
  5. Explain one way Halifax could prevent poor communication on Twitter from happening again in the future. (3)