Santander - Major C***-up - Poor service.

I still wish the best of luck. I feel you are going to need lots of it!

:beer:

seriously move banks once it is all sorted

i had the mispleasure of working for them (thankfully not in the branch) and when i left them and moved house and went to the branch to change my address the trainee managed to majourly screw it up, blocked my accounts, blocked my online access and put me through months of hell. in the end i lost the will to live and got a friend that still worked for them to go and check what was happening. once she had told me what was showing on the system i hit the roof at complaints as it could have been sorted with a couple of clicks basically! a few hundred quid in compensation later with me agreeing to sign a waiver saying i wouldnt go to the ombudsman! by that stage i just wanted to get rid of them so that i could move on.

i had direct debits not paid, i had standing orders paid twice, i had old standing orders re-instated and paid, i had charges upon charges upon charges due to their incompetance. its not worth the damage they will eventually do to your credit rating. when they are good they are great but when they screw up its hell.

good luck with them, keep detailed notes of who you speak to, what time you speak to them, and the jist of it as it will be needed at some point in the future.

Read this with interest - I've just cancelled my account with Santander this week as they are terrible when there's a query. Santander seem to appear in every list of the 'worst customer service' lists that the consumer websites/magazines publish.

I cancelled mine after I applied for another account with them and they accused me of fraud! The customer service operators in Delhi stick to a script and I failed miserably at even getting a complaint recognised. If I thought it would do any good, I'd have complained again about the way my complaint had been handled... branches seem to have limited powers to do anything. Nothing against the individuals who work there, of course, but there's only so much patience with them you can show. Even my branch rep admitted that the systems were inadequate.

Life's too short though - and now I'm with First Direct. It's a dream in comparison!

Good point made above, too - Santander could mess up your credit rating. I had to wait 13 months for a fraud alert to come off the CFASS records held about me. Not an immediately urgent thing once you get to the bottom of it, as some of you guys will well know, but a worry when you first hear about it nonetheless!

Penny