I thought First Direct had an excellent record for customer service?

crazygoog

Well that certainly isn't my experience. Having heard of their 'excellent' customer service and fantastic mortgage rates, I decided to give them my custom. Long term it might work out brilliant, but so far I have found their customer service to be non-existent!

Knocking up 4 months ago now we started the process of remortgaging to them - and we are still nowhere near completion. We were told which documents they required authorised copies of and originals, so we made an appointment with a solicitor to get this done - obviously at our expense. So there were no blame, we sent these Special Delivery. A few days later we had half sent back to us. We thought they must have finished with these (as I'm sure most would). They kept my wife's P60 and recent payslips. We were told that once the documents had gone to them, they would be in touch in 'a few weeks' regarding the latest progress. They said they pride themselves on keeping their customers informed every step of the way - all sounding brilliant so far. But after 6 weeks of hearing nothing, we decided to give them a call. We didn't want to nag, hence us leaving it 6 or 7 weeks, but felt it necessary. What we were told astounded me. The documents that they had sent back to us weren't actually copied, so they needed them back. The P60 and payslips have gone missing at their end too. And to top it all off, when we asked why they hadn't been in touch regarding these issues weeks ago, they said that they have so many applications they don't chase customers if they need further information! Which begs the question - how is the customer supposed to know if anything is wrong at First Direct's end, barring phoning them every week?

So we were told to re-send the documents - at our own expense, despite their !!!!-up. Obviously we scoffed at this idea, so they said we could take them into our local HSBC for them to verify and fax off immediately to them. First Direct would email our local HSBC to tell them to expect us. So we made an appointment for 'anytime after 2.30pm' yesterday. Lo-and-behold HSBC never received this email, but were courteous anyway and did everything we needed anyway. First Direct had given us a fax number to give to HSBC to tell them to fax these documents back to them. Surprise surprise the fax number was unrecognised by the fax machine. HSBC have been very helpful throughout this process I must add, and they have assured us that they are going to send these documents in the internal mail to First Direct on our behalf.

I remain hopeful that something may happen soon, but as it stands at this moment in time I simply could not recommend First Direct. I appreciate that there are millions of happy customers, they must be doing something right to top all the surveys, but my experience is something that will remain long in the memory. It had better be worth all this hassle.

crazygoog

Things might finally be moving! The bank account is now set up, and just waiting to arrange for a valuation in the next 7 days allegedly! (Not gonna be holding my breath though).

MajorTom_2

Hi Crazygoog,


Sounds like you've had a poor experience so far, I myself have been with FD for the past 5 years or so and always found them to be superb. I'm not a mortgage customer but having moved over from Lloyds I find them 10 times better.
I had so many issues with Lloyds one of which their credit card division might as well be a completely different company, many a time I would do a transfer from my bank account to the card and it would take 3 days to appear. When I make a transfer from FD to even my Santander CC it shows up about 30 seconds later via web banking.
The worst of all with Lloyds was speaking to someone offshore all the time, I found them hard to understand and they we're robots when it came to asking for something out of the ordinary (computer says no!).
With FD the phone rings on average 3 times and someone English answers, two security questions later they can do pretty much anything I need.
When I first joined them I applied for a loan for a car, I found the car quite quickly but the loan was still waiting for some paperwork for me to send so they upped my overdraft temporarily so I could buy the car that day. I would never had got that with Lloyds!


Everyone has different experiences with the banks, I'm sure there are some people out there more than happy with the likes of Lloyds but out of everyone that's had my custom FD have been the best so far.


MT