When Banking Goes Wrong

So I needed to do some banking stuff this morning, and like I usually do I went to my mobile app to do it.  Through a series of mistakes (all mine) the bank suspended the transaction, fair enough. I then went to call the number suggested by the bank, only to be told that they were ‘experiencing a very high number of calls’ and my call would be placed in a queue. After waiting about 15 minutes, I figured I’d get a faster result if I went to my local branch to talk to someone face to face and sort it out there.

The customer service lady listened to my problem and then told me that because I had done this ‘online’ there was nothing she could do for me and I would have to talk to the call Centre. No doubt seeing the disbelief on my face, she explained that the online part of the bank was a separate department and she had no access to that area. “It’s all online” she explained, “You’ll have to ring them”.

By this time I could feel the temperature rising, and my jaw line hardening. But I bit back my annoyance, gritted my teeth and held my tongue while the lady wrote down the 1300 number I had called a couple of hours earlier. I think she must have noticed the steam coming out of my ears because she offered to let me sit in an empty office and use their phone to make the call. After waiting another half an hour, I finally got through and sorted it out.

So in a nutshell, I sat in a branch of a bank, using their phone to wait on hold for a person from that bank’s call center, because apparently the branch has no ability to sort out a transaction that was done online. ‘Stupid’ was the word that kept coming to mind.

I don’t usually have much to say about banks, and normally I consider them to be a necessary evil. But this strikes me as being a particularly crappy level of customer service that warrants its own blog post. I’d change banks but I suspect that this sort of operating is the norm right across the banking sector. Small wonder that banks get such a bad wrap when they set up their business like this.