MSE News: Santander still worst bank for customer service

I_luv_cats

I have sent a Santander complaint to FOS as it remains all messed up even after 2 tiers.

Complaining to Santander was like dealing with somebody that has their mind on something else like their tea!!

FOS have it in their first stage adjudicator stage (before Ombudsman) so will see what happens.

JuicyJesus

funkymartin wrote: »

Suffice to say, meantime, Sainsbury's card statements have continued to arrive with the high balance showing, and me having to continue to meet minimum payments. I have recently written back to Santander as I'm really angry this had taken so long to deal with and I've also written to the Financial Ombudsman in desperation. I'm quite concerned what has happened to my £3129.71 designed to pay off this card months ago. Hopefully I will get a positive result very soon, plus ample compensation. (They also caused me grieve with my former direct debit transfers and I've just received an official notice from TV Licensing as their payments had ceased unbeknown to me!)

Ask A&L for the payment reference it was sent under, then speak to Sainsbury's card saying that your idiot bank sent a payment to reference xxxx instead of the correct one and have they got any record of it. Chances are it's in one of their holding accounts and it can be recovered fairly easily.

Then kick Santander to the curb.

dzug1

'The goal is to be the best commercial bank in the UK'

Quote from their shareholder newsletter.

I wonder what their plans are to achieve that goal? After all they can scarcely be unaware they have problems. Though you wouldn't know it from the newsletter

I_luv_cats

Their website makes it seem as if they care about complaints and will deal with them swiftly. They have changed it from a couple of days though!

Cheesedoodles

Just thought I would add that I haven't had access to my account since beginning of June (or thereabouts).

I've had so many phonecalls to Santander I can't even add up the hours I've spent talking to them...every time they said "it will be fixed this weekend".

It's now almost 6 months since I lost online access, my accounts are a complete mess.

Luckily I have managed to get my moneys out of there and transferred most of the money to First Direct (did it in branch) but I still have my ISA there. I just asked First Direct to transfer it so we'll see how it goes.

I still, however, have a current account open with them (almost zero balance) a savings account (almost zero balance).

Santander gave their final word mid october and insisted my accounts were fixed. However...they were not! Since they have given the final word FOS "allowed" me to let them deal with it (FOS will not deal with any complaints until Santander has had it's '"final word".

I'm now waiting for the FOS to deal with it. They have said it will be at least 2 months before anyone will look at my complaint.

I don't have a lot of money in there, but I had to spend a LOT of time dealing with these monkeys to move my money to First Direct, cancel direct debits, set up new ones etc. It's a LOT of work.

And now they have the cheak to charge me an "underfunding" fee every month!!

I COULD technically send a letter to Santander asking them to close the accounts, but I really want to see this one through. I've spent so much time sorting this out that I want FOS to look into it and hopefully offer me some compensation. Santander has "kindly" offered a "goodwill" payment of £30....not enough I'm afraid!!

What really strikes me is that if I didn't my mortgage/loan etc to a bank, they would come down on me like a ton of bricks, and I will have black marks against my credit report instantly.

But if the banks don't give me access to MY money, NOTHING happens. They don't care, and they are not given black marks. What happens? They are given MONTHS, even YEARS, to sort it out by the FOS. This is really unfair and drives me mad...

Anyway, I just felt like ranting a bit......6 months without access to my money (apart from going to branch) is REALLY excessive. Last time I spoke and wrote to them, they insisted there was no problem and that my accounts was accessible online and by telephone. Well, they are not and they did not believe me.. Idiots!!

bradski45

Hi,

Hope someone can help here

My girlfriend has been trying desperately to get through the security questions so that she can make a payment from her store card which is looked after by Santander

They seem to ask 4 questions eg, DOB, 1st line of address, date of last purchase, credit limit

The problem is, my girlfriend cant remember the exact date of her last purchase which is apparently not good enough for them and at this point they say that they legally cannot go any further

There seems to be no leniency on the answers which makes it impossible for her to get her balance and give them her new address, and make a payment!

She's even been to citzens advice and they couldnt give any help

Any ideas on how to get through?

Cheers

Scott

Malory

Since I mentioned, in another thread, that I recently switched current accounts from Abbey, I thought I'd list here some of the reasons why I’ve moved.
I had this account for about 5 ½ years. These are a lot of mistakes in a very short period of time.

1. Deactivating husband’s debit card (it was a joint current account) every time he made a “suspicious foreign purchase” (e.g. a £10 shirt from Thailand bought on Ebay) or a purchase of over about £1000 (even though there was enough money in the account to cover it.) He never knew when his debit card would stop working. Good thing it was a joint account and I could take out money for him. Once after his card had been deactivated and he had called their fraud department and confirmed that all the transactions on account were legitimate (he had to speak to two people who didn’t have a clue before he could get to the right person) the person he spoke to told him that the bank couldn’t reactivate his card anyway and he would have to wait two weeks to get a new one in the post.

2. Changed the name on my account from my maiden name to my married name. They never changed the name on my debit card. My bank statements showed my married name on the account but my maiden name on the address at the top of the page. No big deal as long as I can get my money, right? Except, when I received a cheque from the US Treasury in my maiden name, they refused to to deposit it - even though I presented them with my debit card that still had my maiden name on it, my bank statement that was addressed to me in my maiden name and my marriage certificate. I actually formally complained to Abbey about this, and then to the FOS, but got nowhere. Another time, I got a similar US government cheque made out to my maiden name, and HSBC had no problem depositing it. I just had to sign my maiden name and my married name on the back ofthe cheque. In fact, the man at HSBC apologised to me for the fact that, because it was a foreign cheque, it wouldn’t clear right away.

3. I needed a hard copy of my bank statement, on letterhead, for an application for a visa so I could continue to live in the UK. (The “statements” you can print out online, which are really just lists of your transactions, are not acceptable.) I was paranoid about waiting for my monthly statement to come in the post, so I went to my local branch to ask for a copy. When I got to the branch, I had to wait outside because the bank couldn’t open at its official opening time because of some computer glitch. When I finally did see someone, I was told that they couldn’t give me a bank statement, they had to order it from the main office in Sheffield, and it would arrive after my normal statement was due. So I decided I might as well place my trust in the postman. The woman ahead of me in the queue was complaining that, because of the computer glitch, her pay hadn’t gone into her account and she was frantic because she wouldn’t be able to pay any of her bills.

4. Husband went to the branch to deposit a cheque. After he returned, he discovered that the money had been deposited into the wrong account. True, he should have checked the receipt before he left. But when he returned to the bank, and spoke to the same cashier who’d done the original transaction, instead of saying “I’m sorry. I made a mistake,” the cashier LIED to my husband and said that my husband told him to put it in the other account.

5. I registered with HMRC to pay voluntary national insurance contributions by direct debit. One day, I noticed when looking at my direct debits online that my national insurance number was entered incorrectly – off by one digit. So I called HMRC to check with them and they had my NI number correctly; someone at Santander had typed it incorrectly. I called Santander on the phone an they told me I had to go into the branch. When I went to the branch, I was told that it was impossible for Santander to fix, and that I had to call HMRC and fix it. I explained that there was nothing for HMRC to fix because they had done nothing wrong. The HMRC direct debit department had been using my correct NI number all along. But Santander was incapable of fixing a typo that they had made. I ended up having to cancel my direct debit with HMRC and create a new one.

6. Speaking of typos - I moved and filled out a change of address form with Santander. After that , my husband and I stopped getting our statements for our joint account. I had set up address forwarding with the post office, so even if Santander never read their change of address form,we still should have received our statements if they went to my old address. However, we weren’t getting them. I called Santander several times to verify that they had the correct new address, and each time the person repeated my new address correctly. I couldn’t understand why we weren’t getting our statements. Then one day I was in the branch trying to deal with a different problem, and I noticed when looking at my online accounts that their was a typo in my husband’s address (one of the digits in the house number was off) , while my address was typed in correctly. Because his name was first on the account, the statements were going to the wrong address that was associated with his name. (Which happened to be a house with a “Let Agreed” sign on it, up the road from ours, so nobody was living in it.) Every time I had called to verify the address, the person on the phone checked my address, but never bothered to check the addresses of both people on the account.

7. One day when I tried to access my account online, I got an error message saying something like “The system is down temporarily. Please try again later.” After the system was “down” for four days, I decided to call Santander. It turns out that the system was not down at all. Instead, I had lost online access to my accounts. This had to do with the transfer of A&L accounts. I have never had an account with A&L. However, during the transfer, the new system lost the ability to deal with the fact that I had more than one account with Santander (originally opened as Abbey accounts) - a current account and a savings account. After numerous phone calls and visits to the branch, it took over a month for me to get online access back.

P.S. One thing I have learned after working in many different jobs, including working in the marketing department of another UK financial company that is known for abysmal customer service - if a company advertises how good its customer service is or how much it has improved, its customer service is probably crap. If you truly provided good customer service, you wouldn't have to advertise it.

coffers

I've only been banking with Santander for 16 months, but I'm now in the process of transferring my account to Nat West.

Santander's service is an absolute debacle. I requested a replacement Visa Debit Card on the 23rd October and was informed it would take 7-10 working days. A PIN No arrived on Tuesday 26th October. Since this date, I've made five telephone calls to Santander; written three letters of complaint to Santander and written a letter to the Financial Ombudsman because i had not received the promised debit card. Santander did nothing until Saturday 4th December when I received a Visa Debit Card - 30 working days after requesting it. Tried to use the debit card in a store today [Monday 6th December] and the PIN No is invalid, so I will have to contact Santander again tomorrow ... but is it worthwhile because all they offer is apologies and apathy. To date, I have not received a reply to may last letter sent to Santander & the Financial Ombudsman - do either of these organisations truly care about customer satisfaction?!

I would advise anyone thinking of opening an account with Santander to think again - keeping your money under your mattress is preferable to opening an account with this bunch of amateurs.

Toe-Jam

bradski45 wrote: »

Hi,

Hope someone can help here

My girlfriend has been trying desperately to get through the security questions so that she can make a payment from her store card which is looked after by Santander

They seem to ask 4 questions eg, DOB, 1st line of address, date of last purchase, credit limit

The problem is, my girlfriend cant remember the exact date of her last purchase which is apparently not good enough for them and at this point they say that they legally cannot go any further

There seems to be no leniency on the answers which makes it impossible for her to get her balance and give them her new address, and make a payment!

She's even been to citzens advice and they couldnt give any help

Any ideas on how to get through?

Cheers

Scott

Give them the new address in writing to their customer relations department, and her balance will be on her next statement.

AnonymousForObviousReason

bradski45 wrote: »

Hi,

Hope someone can help here

My girlfriend has been trying desperately to get through the security questions so that she can make a payment from her store card which is looked after by Santander

They seem to ask 4 questions eg, DOB, 1st line of address, date of last purchase, credit limit

The problem is, my girlfriend cant remember the exact date of her last purchase which is apparently not good enough for them and at this point they say that they legally cannot go any further

There seems to be no leniency on the answers which makes it impossible for her to get her balance and give them her new address, and make a payment!

She's even been to citzens advice and they couldnt give any help

Any ideas on how to get through?

Cheers

Scott

Move account to another bank that will close the account you're moving from (Lloyds TSB used to do this).