Call centres...

[denny]

I just phoned Abbey phone banking - in some dread, as I've not had a single non-painful experience with their phone banking since they outsourced it all to India a few years ago, and this time I wanted to do something a bit complicated. Much to my surprise, the phone was answered by a Scottish accent.

We proceeded to set up a standing order, and set up an irregular bill payment option, and pay some money through the bill payment option to cover the fact that the standing order wouldn't get there in time. Oh, and get my available balance after this was done. All of this in less time than it took the Indian call centre to find me the opening hours for the Tottenham Court Road branch when I rang them on Saturday*.

I had to ask her howcome I was talking to someone who actually understood what I was saying. She managed not to laugh too much, and explained that there is still one call centre in Scotland, but the Indian centre(s) are larger, so the vast majority of the calls go to them.

All this leaves me wondering how on earth Abbey can justify the shocking drop in their customer service quality caused by the move to Indian call centres. Surely the savings can't in any way correspond to the amount of customers their slow, uncomprehending, badly scripted, initiative-lacking drones piss off on a daily basis? Every time you mention the call centres in a branch, they nod and say that loads of people complain about them, every single day. Gah.

</rant>


* "9am-3pm today Mr Haye"** - so I walked up there only to find that it's actually closed all day on Saturdays.
** yes, they always get my name wrong, every single time. No, the Scottish woman didn't.

Comments

[belaroo.livejournal.com]

Switch to coop or smile; they have either 24 hour banking over the phone from Skelmersdale or Smile which is completley online, you set up your standing orders yourself, even foreign transfers involve writing a sort of secure email with all the details in, you get an email back confirming it happened followed by a letter in the post. Whenever I've spoken to anyone, they have a delightful northern/scouse accent and I've never got frustrated by unhelpfulness or fecklessness, they all have their fecks fully trained there.
Smile do have a line to skelmersdale but mostly you can do everything online. I manage 6 different accounts including ISA's, joint accounts and savings accounts all from one login and you can transfer instantly between them or other Smile/coop users. I've never heard a bad word about either smile or coop and they practice ethical trading so your money isn't being invested in child slavery or Nestle. You get more interest than most of the other banks, and they offer a range of accounts with at least the same sort of perks as Abbey. You can pay money in at any post office - your nearest coop in london would be...Angel tube.
Here endeth the sermon.

[bluecassandra.livejournal.com]

It's because no matter how shit the call centres get people still can't be arsed to change banks.

[nisaba.livejournal.com]

Well, you're complaining, but you haven't left them. That's how they justify it...

Second the recommendation for smile.