M&S Call centre asking too many questions

born_again

BobQ wrote: »

The only scam here is the usual practice of lots of firms to use conversations with customers to extract more information than they need.

Not sure what extra information you are talking about. As the questions the OP mentioned will ALL be details they already hold. As they are basic customer information for a bank.

andyca

born_again wrote: »

Not sure what extra information you are talking about. As the questions the OP mentioned will ALL be details they already hold. As they are basic customer information for a bank.

Call centre employees will typically have access to a very restricted set of data which will be the minimum required to perform the tasks they need to do. The most plausible explanation so far was that this employee had to hand the task off to someone more senior so went through noting down all the answers to the security questions they might have needed to bring up my mum in the system without needing to call her back.



Still not ideal that there may be a post-it note or email with all this data floating around in a call centre, but without any ID documents I guess the scope of the possible issue would be limited to digital account access so we've set her up with 2FA for most accounts. (never a bad thing)



Thanks for the replies everyone, it's put her mind at ease, although I'm wondering what the systems are like at M&S and what people have access to now. :think:

Robin9

I don't know know what M&S are like but it's the security questions that were set up many years ago and that you had to make up answers that I can fail on - father's middle name : he didn't have one; mother's middle name : she had 2; eight and tenth letter of your password and one of them is a alpha-numeric !

born_again

andyca wrote: »

Call centre employees will typically have access to a very restricted set of data which will be the minimum required to perform the tasks they need to do. The most plausible explanation so far was that this employee had to hand the task off to someone more senior so went through noting down all the answers to the security questions they might have needed to bring up my mum in the system without needing to call her back.


Thanks for the replies everyone, it's put her mind at ease, although I'm wondering what the systems are like at M&S and what people have access to now. :think:

M&S use HSBC supplied systems. In fact you may actually find that it was HSBC employees taking the call.

HSBC run what they like to call "Center of Excellence" departments where staff will take calls from "Within the Brand"
So that can be First Direct, HSBC or M&S dealing with customers from any of them.

M&S call center staff will have full access to your mums details and will also be able to process the refund themselves.
No point in keeping customer details from staff, as that leads to higher costs due to having to pass work on.

BobQ

born_again wrote: »

Not sure what extra information you are talking about. As the questions the OP mentioned will ALL be details they already hold. As they are basic customer information for a bank.

That really depends on what the 'etc' covers. My point was more general. For example a question like "are you an owner occupier" is fine on credit application but they sometimes ask this when you just want to deposit your own money.! Festive cynicism:D