It’s a riddle of the modern age: when is your bank not experiencing ‘unusually high call volumes’? You can puzzle the answer while listening to 20 minutes of looped Vivaldi interrupted sporadically by a disembodied female voice apologising for this delay.
I recently called my bank at around 10.30 at night and endured exactly the same routine. This makes me suspect these frustrating delays have more to do with banks economising on call-centre staff, rather than my continued misfortune of ringing just as 100-odd other customers decide they also want to set up a new direct debit.
To be fair this isn’t just a problem with our banks. Calling broadband providers, energy companies or other utilities can be a similarly time-consuming and soul-sapping experience.
It wasn’t always this way though. About five to 10 years ago I generally got straight through to my bank – even when I had the temerity to ring on a Monday morning or weekday lunchtime.
There was still an automated menu to negotiate. But from memory it was simply a case of hitting one, then three, then seven and you were through to a real person – be they in Middlesbrough or Mumbai – who could hopefully help.
What makes this particularly frustrating is that there are now lower call volumes to banks than there were a decade ago, thanks to the fact far more of us do our banking online, or via mobile apps.
According to figures from the British Bankers’ Association, the number of people contacting their bank by phone fell by a staggering 43 per cent between 2008 and 2013.
The same economic logic that has seen banks close smaller branches – as there is no longer the footfall to justify their expense – seems to be driving them to reduce investment in call centres.
The only difference is that when banks closes a branch they have to publicise this fact – at least to the local community. Small businesses and customers who still want to cash cheques at counters are usually offered the option of using ‘shared’ branches run by rivals, or the local post office.
When call centre staff are slashed to save costs, customers generally don’t get to hear about it. They can only surmise this has happened when they are habitually left on hold.
While more of us are quite happy to use digital banking services I think few want to be left to the vagaries of an online-only bank: unreliable wifi, holidays in the wilder regions of East Anglia, or the prospect of the bank’s own system going completely kaput means we could easily be left without access to the most basic banking services.
It may be true that when people ring their bank today they have slightly more complicated queries than ‘can I get a duplicate statement, please’ – an excuse often used by the banks for these delays.
But these complex queries can be more urgent. To be told you have to wait up to half an hour even at peak time to speak to your bank is poor customer service. To be asked to wait that long outside of these hours is completely out of order. If trains arrive this late, they have to pay passengers compensation – why aren’t banks required to offer similar recompense for messing us around?
I find it staggering that banks don’t have any public ‘targets’ – let alone cast-iron guarantees – that they’ll answer customer phone calls within a certain timeframe – say five or 10 minutes.
I’ve yet to speak to a bank chief executive, marketing director or press spokesman who hasn’t insisted that their organisation is now far more ‘customer-focused’ than it was in the bad old days of PPI mis-selling/ Libor-rigging/ irresponsible lending or whatever recent scandal you’d like to name.
Not making consumers queue unnecessarily to use the services you provide would seem to me a keystone of this customer service philosophy.
Most customers need an advance degree in mathematics to compare the range of interest rates and overdraft fees charged on different bank accounts. I wonder what would happen if banks started competing for new customers on service standards instead?
I don’t mean a glossy ad and some glib promise about ‘putting the customer first’. Let’s see them commit to some concrete proposals that impact our day-to-day dealing with banks – like answering calls promptly.
Who knows it might solve that other great banking riddle of our time: why don’t more people switch bank accounts? Perhaps making people feel like valued customers, rather than captive mugs, might be just the spur people need.
Emma Simon is a freelance consumer journalist and former Personal Finance Editor at The Sunday Telegraph
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