Which is the best/worst customer service bank?' Aug 2011 poll discussion

Martinslovechild

LimeLight wrote: »

Can't say i've ever had a problem with Santander.

Congratulations!! The only people I know who haven't had a problem with Santander are those who don't have a Santander account!!

Acremead

abbeygirl wrote: »

So unfair, I have had great service from my local branch of Santander. Staff are really helpful and go out of their way to help if any queries on my account. Have however been into the branch when very rude customers have been quite abusive to staff members who I must say handled the situation very calmly.

As your handle is 'Abbeygirl' can we take it that you are employed by Santander?

My own experience of Santander: had £50k with an A&L account. As the interest was about to plummet and A & L had just been taken over by Santander I assumed it would be easy to transfer to a new Santander high interest account. What a pantomime. Basically I spent a whole day (internet, phone, attendance at a branch) trying to give them my £50k before giving up and transferring it to Barnsley BS, where the transaction was completed in minutes.

Rude customers being abusive? I wonder why...............

Mark_Thriscutt

This sort of feedback on the level of service provided by banks (and other service providers) is really important if we as customers are ever to apply pressure on the laggards to improve. However, the data displayed here, whilst valuable, is difficult to assimilate easily or quickly, thereby reducing its impact.

Can I suggest that whilst keeping this data, you also include a summary for each bank, with a simple single score, so that we can quickly see who scores well and badly? For example, weight the scores, perhaps as follows:

Good service = +1
Average service = 0
Poor service = -1

However, what really counts is when things go wrong: all banks are likely to provide fairly decent service whilst a customer is in credit, but what REALLY matters is when times are tough and a customer is in debt. This is when we really want to know if they will stick by us, or just dump us! Therefore, why not double (or even triple) the above weightings for customers who are in debt to the bank, in order to really separate out the good ones from the bad!

Just a thought! I would be interested to see what this would show. (If I had the time (and the data in the right format), I would try this out.) Any other volunteers for this?!