Banks Passing Their Customers On To The Post Office

opinions4u

The Bill Payment option for Halifax card holders is easy stuff and has existed for donkeys years. This applies equally to full facility bank accounts and unprofitable basic bank accounts too.

Once set up, the customer can wander over to any Halifax ATM and pay their bill there and then. Only a need for card, PIN and cleared funds. It's not as if they've ever offered the facility to pay bills at their counters anyway.

Why anybody would still want to pay a bill over a bank counter in the 21st century is well and truly beyond me.

Why anybody would want to queue for 20 minutes anywhere to do anything is quite beyond me too.

Inactive

opinions4u wrote: »

Why anybody would want to queue for 20 minutes anywhere to do anything is quite beyond me too.

They only have to queue because the greedy banks do not employ enough staff to service customers needs.

If an option is available, it is surely the customers choice of how they choose to use it, or otherwise.

RayWolfe

You are right only if you believe that waiting for 20 mins is acceptable. It could be that banks arrogance leads them to believe that customers waiting time is not their problem ... bit like the man from the post office. Bloody customers blocking the door!
As for call center waiting times! Don't get me started ... but some businesses believe that customers are only to appear when it's convenient to them. If they could learn from the Tescos of this world, that queues are anathema, then maybe they would be successful instead of needing to be rescued by taxpayers.

Extant

1jim wrote: »

Customers are not stupid they will just move elsewhere!

Huh, really? So how come the banks that don't accept Bank Giro Credits (as said, Abbey/Halifax) still have customers?

What intrigues me is how some counter staff swallow the party line hook line and sinker into believing that customers dont need or want to use counter services and that if they can get customers to perform transactions in other ways the business will be more profitable and from this they seem to infer greater job security.......my take on this would be that when customers are disuaded from using the counter, the counter will close, when it closes the counter staff will be looking for work elsewhere.

Some counter staff might, sure. Although Barclays doesn't currently push customers away from the counter - there's no target for kiosk usage, etc. - it makes sense for customers to go use that machine for statements. The "statement" you'd get from a Barclays counter is just a list of entries, it's really more for the use of staff. The kiosk will give you the full information, as you'd see on a regular statement. So I have no problem with that.

That aside, some staff - such as ShelfStacker - are obviously more open to change and their beliefs are shaped that way. It's not necessarily that they've swallowed the party line, some people do honestly believe it.

Also: cashiers or someone at that level will not disappear in a very, very long time - they'll just switch over to helping customers use the machines. There will also always be a role for them as long as businesses keep taking cash.

To the people in the know..can you tell me how many staff work in the fully automated branches and compare this to how many staff worked in those branches before they became fully automated?

We've recently opened a new flagship branch in Piccadilly. It's very pretty and all that. Anyway, it's a B6 branch (Barclays branches range in size from B3 to B6, so that's the largest site size) and it's set to run roughly on the same cap as a B4/B5 branch with all the machines in place - so you're talking potentially 20 people as opposed to 30.

opinions4u

RayWolfe wrote: »

You are right only if you believe that waiting for 20 mins is acceptable. It could be that banks arrogance leads them to believe that customers waiting time is not their problem ... bit like the man from the post office. Bloody customers blocking the door!
As for call center waiting times! Don't get me started ... but some businesses believe that customers are only to appear when it's convenient to them. If they could learn from the Tescos of this world, that queues are anathema, then maybe they would be successful instead of needing to be rescued by taxpayers.

I actually agree with most of your points Ray.

Have you tried opening a savings account with Tesco though? They haven't exactly dealt with their processing queues too well.

RayWolfe

opinions4u wrote: »

I actually agree with most of your points Ray.

Have you tried opening a savings account with Tesco though? They haven't exactly dealt with their processing queues too well.

Touche!

My analogy was their supermarkets, but I accept defeat.

Extant

Inactive wrote: »

They only have to queue because the greedy banks do not employ enough staff to service customers needs.

Hello, and welcome to business...

Banks are not Tescos. Banks do not fit in with regular retail. You cannot take a bank cashier and get them stacking shelves.

If you hire a cashier, they're cashiering and that's it. You've got to keep them up to date with their training, money laundering, fraud, etc. It's not as simple to cashier as you may think.

Now bearing all of that in mind, the bank needs to employ an adequate number of cashiers to cover the "average" customer flow. Unfortunately, yes, that will result in some longer waiting periods at some points - because that's offset by the downtime when there's no customers and they're doing nothing. It's about getting a balance there, not about over or under staffing.

Yes, it would be lovely if you could wonder into a bank and find rows of cashiers waiting to serve you - but that is expensive. They're at least £13k each a year, and over thousands of branches, that adds up. To give every Barclays branch one extra cashier, you're talking about at least £25m a year on salary and taxes alone - ignoring training and uniform, etc.

Whilst I'm sure you're going to contrast that cost to the profits banks make, we have both a legal and moral responsibility to our shareholders to make profit, and we're not going to do it through frivolous expenditure.

Inactive

BarclaysManager wrote: »

Whilst I'm sure you're going to contrast that cost to the profits banks make, we have both a legal and moral responsibility to our shareholders to make profit, and we're not going to do it through frivolous expenditure.

I thought that the banks had demonstrated fully that they are experts at " frivulous expenditure " over recent months.:rolleyes:

Even your Chief Executive almost apologised to customers for the way they have acted.

RayWolfe

"Moral responsibility to our shareholders."

I agree, you have a fiduciary duty to your shareholders and that is the problem; limited companies are amoral and have NO regard to the wider duty to society. Banks (and others) have demonstrated this to a degree of passion that has all but killed off capitalism. It is no good expecting people to be moral if the only god - money making - has none.

Of course you have to make a profit but not at the expense of all other considerations ... and, when you think about it, profit for shareholders is pretty low down on the list of CEOs; profit for themselves is the ONLY motivation. So we have a list of priorities for some large businesses:
CEOs compensation
CEOs pension pots
Other senior managers compensation (Compensation? It used to be called salary!)
Avoiding paying dues to society
Shareholders
Football sponsorship or other "jolly" extravagances
Staff
Customers
Society

That's the system today, but it wasn't always that way. I think of the chocolate, pharmaceutical companies and building societies of old or even the de Haans who founded and ran SAGA to find a more modern equivalent.

So a happy new year to all banks and others that have contempt for their customers; maybe the three spirits of Christmas has visited them and all will be different in the new year.

Bernie

opinions4u wrote: »

Have you tried opening a savings account with Tesco though? They haven't exactly dealt with their processing queues too well.

My wife has opened a Tesco Savings account too - it's taken weeks for them to open the account and encash the original deposit cheque, now she has applied for internet access and that's taking weeks too.

Tesco have sent two letters since my wife made the online application, the second arrived two weeks after the first was mailed back first class, each asking for an example of her signature!! The second was mailed back on 15 Dec 08 and my wife is still waiting for Tesco to send access details.

We made a test internet transfer on 5 Dec 08 and are still waiting to confirm this before sending more funds.

Tesco's legendary management strength is clearly missing from judging by the lamentable customer service we've both witnessed. If we'd known they were this bad, we would have chosen a different provider. Hopefully the on-going service is better...

:beer: