Two years ago I had a problem. I had an unused bank account with zero balance, where I didn’t even have access anymore, while the bank was charging me a monthly fee.
Naturally, I’ve found their client services phone number, called and wanted to close the account. Originally, I thought it would be easy. Two days later and around 60 minutes on a phone I was where I started.
I’ve called the main customer service number. After a short conversation, I’ve been told that they are not dealing with remote account closures and I should try to call their “helpdesk”, which was a different number. So I’ve called the helpdesk number, explain the problem again and told me that they can’t help that I should call their main number again. I’ve called again and was told to try to call my branch. Luckily, I remembered where I’ve opened the account 15 years ago and the branch still existed. Found the number, called, explained my problem and was told that I cannot close it remotely, they recommended I pay the fees on time otherwise “it” will ruin my credit score. They also told me several misleading information about my rights and the contract.
What’s the point of this poorly written story. It was just shitty service and there is plenty of those, but it made me think about what made it so frustrating.
My expectation was that I have one point of contact with my bank (i.e. the main client support phone number), I have a problem which surely is not as rare and I want to do a very basic operation, which they will have a well-written semi-automated procedure, so I will “hand it over” and will get a solution.
It could have been just my experience, but what I’m thinking now is that all the teams and people I’ve talked nor once were trying to solve my problem. It’s almost like all people were told “your job is to answer an inbound call and give an answer if you know it.”. They never asked for help from their team when they weren’t sure. They didn’t know, which teams in their company would help me and what their remits were and just pushed me to the beginning when they as individuals ran out of ideas.
My expectation was that the individuals would approach it with “surely as a team or department we should be able to resolve this”, but I never got further than talking to an individual and reaching “I really don’t know, try someone else”. I wanted to talk to a team or department, represented by the individual employee rather than just to the employee.
“What is this garbage?!”
I kind of lost a plot here a little. Where I wanted to get to is that we write job descriptions for individuals and descriptions of the products and services we sell, but we rarely define teams/departments responsibilities in the same way. Team to team or department to department communication mostly looks like a person to person conversation and in most cases, it is expected that person represent the team and its capability and responsibility.
The system engineering will come in the further posts, so for the one person who will read this – go to part two.
Just above average 