Santander Frustrating your Calls?

dubh12

Do you sometimes find that when you are on the phone to a Call Centre, you are asked to "hold" without being given an explanation, and then find that you have been inexplicably transferred to another member of staff or to a different department, neither of whom are aware that this has been done to you?
Recently, I made a call to Santander's Group Customer Relations [customer relations? What a joke!]. After asking me the usual security questions, he then asked me to "hold", without saying why. A substantial period of waiting and listening to their irritating music followed until he returned. When he eventually returned, I asked the question I needed answered only to be told he "wasn't sure" of the answer. I then asked who could I speak to who would know the answer. Again, he asked me to "hold" without saying why. After another period of waiting, a lady came on the phone and said she needed to ask me some security questions. When I asked her where the other person who was dealing with me had gone, she said she was unaware that anyone else had been dealing with my call and that my call had come through to her without any reference or information or explanation. When I told her that I had already given my security details, and my query, to the previous person, she was genuinely apologetic and annoyed that the previous person had abandoned me in such a nasty fashion and she told me he should not have dealt with my call in that way. She further explained why it was not a nice thing he had done because she, in fact, only dealt with Alliance and Leicester accounts and not Santander. Clearly,the man who had initially taken my call decided for whatever reason that he couldn't be bothered dealing with my query any longer and malevolently switched my call without warning or explanation to another department and then disappearing from the scene himself, so to speak.
These cowboy tactics are not confined only to Santander. It happens with other call centres too. And it is so difficult to track down the culprit! Many staff don't give their names, or do so in a low tone or an indistinct way. You could spend ages trying to get them to clarify it for you. This kind of treatment causes intense frustration, anger and hurt but these large centres who are only identifiable by their phone number instead of an address don't seem to care. They waste your money and frustrate your efforts to chastise them.
By the way, the call I made to Santander was to their expensive 0844 number. At the end of it, I had spent 30 minutes on the phone, almost all of that time spent on "hold", and I then had to abandon any further attempt to get my original query dealt with. Companies who do these things to customers should have crippling penalties applied to them by an Ombudsman.